ActiveCampaign destination

Send your event data from RudderStack to ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign is a popular marketing automation and CRM platform. It offers an all-in-one email marketing and growth platform to monitor your users’ product behavior and use the insights to design personalized customer experiences.

RudderStack supports ActiveCampaign as a destination to which you can seamlessly send your event data.

Find the open source transformer code for this destination in the GitHub repository.

Setup

  1. In your RudderStack dashboard, go to Directory > Destinations > Cloud Destinations and search for ActiveCampaign.
  2. Connect your source and click Continue.

Connection settings

Configure the following settings to set up ActiveCampaign as a destination in RudderStack:

  • API URL: Enter the ActiveCampaign API URL for your account.
  • API Key: Enter the ActiveCampaign API key.
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To get the API URL and API key, log in to your ActiveCampaign account and go to the Settings page under the Developer tab.

Connection mode

RudderStack supports the following connection modes for sending events to ActiveCampaign:

Connection modeWebMobileServer
Device modeSupported--
Cloud modeSupportedSupportedSupported
Hybrid modeSupported--
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This destination supports hybrid mode for the JavaScript source. For more information, see Send events in hybrid mode section.

Send events in hybrid mode

You can use hybrid mode to send all events to ActiveCampaign from your JavaScript source.

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In hybrid mode, RudderStack sends the identify, track, and screen events to ActiveCampaign via their REST API and page calls via the native ActiveCampaign SDK.

To send events via hybrid mode, use the hybrid mode option(highlighted below) while connecting your source to the ActiveCampaign destination.

ActiveCampaign hybrid mode connection setting
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Use hybrid mode to implement site tracking in ActiveCampaign.

You can also leverage all the RudderStack cloud mode benefits like data governance and tracking plans.

Configuration settings

After completing the initial setup, configure the following settings to correctly receive your data in ActiveCampaign:

  • Event Key: This value is unique to your ActiveCampaign account. See ActiveCampaign documentation for more information on obtaining the event key.
  • ActID: Enter your ActiveCampaign actid. Go to Settings > Tracking > Event Tracking API to get your actid.

Other settings

  • OneTrust Cookie Categories: This setting lets you associate the OneTrust cookie consent groups to ActiveCampaign.

Identify

You can use the identify call to create a new user in ActiveCampaign. If a user already exists, RudderStack updates the user with the latest values.

A sample identify call is shown below:

rudderanalytics.identify("userId", {
  email: "john@example.com",
  firstName: "John",
  lastName: "Keener",
  phone: "1234567890"
});

In the above snippet, RudderStack captures relevant user information like their userId and the associated traits like email, phone, firstName, and lastName, before sending this information to ActiveCampaign.

warning
email is a mandatory trait for mapping a user to ActiveCampaign.

Set custom tags

You can associate a user with custom tags by passing the tags trait in your identify call:

rudderanalytics.identify("userId", {
  email: "john@example.com",
  firstName: "John",
  lastName: "Keener",
  phone: "1234567890",
  tags: ["Returning User", "Coupon Used"]
});
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tags should contain an array of tags you want to associate with the user. If any tag is already present in ActiveCampaign, RudderStack will skip creating that tag.

Send custom fields

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To send custom fields to ActiveCampaign, you will need to first create the custom fields in ActiveCampaign for each custom value that you want to send.

When you call identify with the keys matching those traits, RudderStack updates the custom fields for that contact.

You can update a contact by passing custom fields in your identify calls to ActiveCampaign.

You can use the fieldInfo trait to set values for the custom fields, as shown:

rudderanalytics.identify("userId", {
  email: "john@example.com",
  firstName: "John",
  lastName: "Keener",
  phone: "1234567890",
  tags: ["Returning User", "Coupon Used"],
  fieldInfo: {
    Interest: "Electronics",
    Country: "USA",
    Hobbies: ["Cricket", "Tennis"]
  }
});
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Note that:

  • The fieldInfo trait contains the value of the custom field that you want to store for that contact. For using this feature, you need to create the custom fields from your ActiveCampaign dashboard before passing the values in the event.
  • To send multi-choice field values for the fields having a checkbox, or list values as an input, you need to send the values as an array. For example: "Hobbies": ["Cricket","Tennis"].
  • For the date field, the format should be YYYY-MM-DD. Also, the values for the datetime field should be in a ISO datetime format, that is, yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss. SSSXXX.

Subscribe contacts to lists

You can subscribe or unsubscribe a contact from any number of lists by passing a lists trait in your identify call. This trait should be an array with each element having an id and a status. The value of status must be either subscribe or unsubscribe.

rudderanalytics.identify("userId", {
  email: "john@example.com",
  firstName: "John",
  lastName: "Keener",
  phone: "1234567890",
  tags: ["Returning User", "Coupon Used"],
  fieldInfo: {
    Interest: "Electronics",
    Country: "USA",
    Hobbies: ["Cricket", "Tennis"]
  },
  lists: [
    {
      id: 2,
      status: "subscribe"
    },
    {
      id: 3,
      status: "unsubscribe"
    }
  ]
});
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For associating a contact to any list, you need to create the list in ActiveCampaign and use the id parameter for mapping that contact.

Track

The track call lets you record the user actions along with any properties associated with them.

A sample track call looks like the following:

rudderanalytics.track("Product Purchased", {
  name: "Rubik's Cube"
});

In the above snippet, RudderStack captures the information related to the Product Purchased event along with the product’s name.

RudderStack also maps eventData present within the track event properties to ActiveCampaign’s eventdata field:

rudderanalytics.track("Product Purchased", {
  name: "Rubik's Cube",
  eventData: "Learn while having fun"
});

Event name considerations

ActiveCampaign sets certain restrictions in the way you can set your track event names:

  • The event name must contain only alphanumeric characters. ActiveCampaign rejects any event containing special characters in the name.
  • The event name should not exceed 32 characters. ActiveCampaign automatically truncates event names longer than 32 characters. For example, if you send a track event with the name Product Viewed After Opening The Browser, ActiveCampaign automatically truncates it to Product Viewed After Opening The:
ActiveCampaign truncating event names

Page

You can use the page call to record user’s page views along with the associated properties and send this information to ActiveCampaign. You must call this method at least once per page load.

When you call page, RudderStack will send that event to ActiveCampaign as a site tracking event - this allowlists your domain for tracking purposes.

A sample page call looks like the following:

rudderanalytics.page("home", {
  path: "path",
  url: "url",
  title: "title",
  search: "search",
  referrer: "referrer"
});

In the above sample, RudderStack captures the information related to the viewed page and the url property is used to allowlist the website in ActiveCampaign.

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The page calls work only if Site Tracking is enabled in ActiveCampaign. You can enable this setting by going to the Tracking tab in your ActiveCampaign settings page.

Screen

The screen lets you record whenever your user views their mobile screen with any additional relevant information about the screen.

A sample screen call is shown:

[[RSClient sharedInstance] screen:@"Sample Screen Viewed" properties:@{@"prop_key" : @"prop_value"}];
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The screen event name must contain only alphanumeric characters.

ActiveCampaign rejects events with any special characters in the name.

FAQ

Can I use special characters in my screen and track event names?

No - your screen and track event names must contain only alphanumeric characters. ActiveCampaign prescribes that the screen and track event names must contain only alphabets and numbers and does not allow using any special characters.

How does RudderStack send events to ActiveCampaign in hybrid mode?

In hybrid mode, RudderStack sends the user-generated events (identify, track, screen) events to ActiveCampaign via cloud mode and sends the page events via device mode (using the native ActiveCampaign web SDK).


Questions? Contact us by email or on Slack