First Party Data Integration (CRM)

Onboarding your organization’s first-party user data is an invaluable step towards 1:1 personalization, enabling you to target your visitors as efficiently and accurately as possible, using both online behavioral data that is collected by Dynamic Yield, as well as any online or offline data available to you exclusively. Complementing your Dynamic Yield data with first-party data unleashes the true potential and value of what can be achieved when visitors arrive at your site; make your visitors feel at home as you tailor their experience to their data, boost your site’s performance and increase conversions.

How Does the First-Party User Data Integration Work?

Dynamic Yield collects online behavioral data about every single visitor. Meanwhile, the provided first-party data is synced on a daily basis to Dynamic Yield’s secure servers. In order to match between a first-party data source user and an online user, a common unique identifier is required, preferably the user’s (hashed) email address. Whenever the user logs in or registers, the unique identifier is reported by means of a Dynamic Yield event, which in turn is mapped to the relevant first-party data entry and attributes associated with this user in real-time. You can configure the integration with one or multiple data sources.

Which Data Attributes Are Onboarded?

The selected attributes should include any data that is valuable for targeting your visitors: demographic data (gender, age, marital status, education, etc.), geographic data (billing and shipping country, city, etc.), interests and preferences, buyer persona and internal segments captured by your BI tools (VIP client, frequent buyer, etc.).

We recommend starting with a limited set of attributes (around 5) so that you can quickly get up and running before adding more attributes. The maximum number of attributes depends on a few factors, but is generally around 40. If you have many more attributes, we recommend splitting the data into two data feeds. Work with your Customer Success Manager to optimize the number of attributes. 

Dynamic Yield natively supports a large variety of targeting conditions, including product engagement conditions based on your purchase history, so there is no need to upload all of the activity and transactional data from your data base:

Integrating Dynamic Yield with Your First-Party Data

Every organization’s requirements and data is unique, and therefore integrating this data is a highly customized process that often requires several iterations to maximize value.

Step 1: Map your key data points

1. Provide your Customer Success Manager with a representative sample of your first-party data in CSV format (must be comma separated).
2. Your Customer Success Manager will schedule a meeting to review the sample and map out the most relevant and valuable fields/data points.

Step 2: Determine a common identifier

1. Each record should include a unique identifier, in order to match between a first-party data user and an online user. The recommended unique identifier is the email address (SHA256 hash of the lowercase email address).
2. Implement the Login, Signup, and Newsletter Subscription events in order to report the common identifier as clients visit your site. For details, see the Omnichannel Events section of Events.
3. Optional: Any additional identification instance by the visitor (e.g. arriving from a newsletter) can be reported to Dynamic Yield with the Script Utilities.

Step 3: Initiate a daily upload process

1. You will be provided with credentials to AWS S3 by your Customer Success Manager. This will grant you access to a dedicated folder to upload your first-party user data.
2. Set up an upload process that will sync the data in your dedicated folder to guarantee your data is up to date. Initiate an upload process using the following guidelines:
   • Data should be exported in CSV format.
   • Data should be uploaded on a daily basis.
   • Each upload should have its own folder. The folder name should be based on the following format: “upload_YYYY-MM-DD_HH-mm” (including the upload date and time)
     • The file name itself should be the same in all uploads (CRM_data.csv)
       For example: upload_2016-10-20_00-37/CRM_data.csv
   • Your data dump may only include one file.
   • The daily data dump may only include a full snapshot of your first-party data. Python Example:
     

     id = "replace this with your access key"
     secret = "replace with your secret key"
      
     if __name__ == '__main__':
         import boto
         s3_connection = boto.connect_s3(aws_access_key_id=id, aws_secret_access_key=secret, is_secure=False)
         bucket = s3_connection.get_bucket('com.dynamicyield.crm', validate=False)
         
        
         key = bucket.get_key('/test', validate=False)
         key.set_contents_from_string('test content')
         print key.get_contents_as_string()
         
         rs = bucket.list(prefix='/')
         for i in rs:
             print i
             

3. Once the above steps have been completed, the data will be processed by Dynamic Yield’s batch processes and upon completion, the relevant conditions will appear in your account’s UI. Data processing time may vary – please follow up with your Customer Success Manager for an ETA as to when your 'CRM Data' conditions will be available.

Dealing with Large Feed Files

The maximum supported file size is 100MB. FIles bigger than that should be split into multiple files, each around 40MB. The structure of the files must be identical, uploaded to the same daily folder but each file should contain information about different users.  

When working with one file, the name should be CRM_data.csv.

When working with multiple files, add a number to the beginning of the name as follows:

• 1CRM_data.csv
• 2CRM_data.csv
• etc.

All file names should end with CRM_data.csv.

For more information, speak to your Customer Success Manager.

First-Party 'CRM Data' Conditions

Once your data has been onboarded, you will be able to use the Audience Explorer to immediately explore these valuable segments and analyze their performance vs. your entire online userbase, complemented with the users’ behavioral data captured by Dynamic Yield. These conditions can be coupled with any other Dynamic Yield condition available in your account and used to create and save micro-targetable segments (“Audiences”) that can be incorporated into your Dynamic Yield Site Personalization experiences and Recommendations.