Overview

Event Ingestion API environments

There are three different API endpoints you can send events to. The event references below use the dev environment.

Environment	Endpoint
Production	https://simonsignal.com/http/v1/collect
Staging	https://staging.simonsignal.com/http/v1/collect
Dev	https://dev.simonsignal.com/http/v1/collect

Use these different endpoints to integrate with Simon based on the environments you deploy to.

All request payloads sent to Simon's Event Ingestion API will have the following:

Parameter	Required	Description
`partnerId`	Yes	The internal partnerId Simon uses to identify the customer's site.
`context`	Yes	A dictionary containing optional fields about the context of the event.
`clientId`	Yes	A unique identifier for the device. If no unique identifier for the device can be maintained this may be a unique identifier for the current session (max length: 45 characters).
`partnerSecret`	Yes	The shared secret used for authentication.
`ipAddress`	No	The public IP address of the users device if available.
`sentAt`	Yes	Epoch time in milliseconds of when the request was sent. Epoch time is the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT).
`timezone`	No	The time difference between UTC time and local time, in minutes. See https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_gettimezoneoffset.asp for an example.
`type`	Yes	The high level type of request being sent in can be either `track` or `identify`.

If you do not know your partner ID, contact your account manager.

The optional context attributes:

Parameter	Description
`debug`	A setting for development, when if True, will tell the HTTP API to send validation errors as HTTP 412 errors. Boolean field, defaults to False.
`name`	Unique name for your client library. For example, our Simon JavaScript SDK sets this to `simon.js`.
`version`	Version identifier for your client library.
`userAgent`	The user agent of the device sending the event, if available.
`page`	A dictionary representing parameters relevant to the page's context.
`url`	The page url of the event which the event was triggered from, if available.
`device`	A dictionary representing parameters relevant to the device's context.
`type`	String identifying the type of client device (e.g. android).

Sending clickstream data to Simon Data

🚧
Exceptions and debug mode
If you're unsure about whether your event is correctly formatted, you can use the debug mode. Exceptions will be silent unless the debug mode is active. Check out the details below.

The identify command

This is an example of an identify call:

{
    "partnerId": "804f98b48491143c2e4f2ffea854eb372a41bbfd",
    "clientId": "92adbc3c-c22b-49bf-a9ae-11d9e8b3e6b4",
    "context": {
        "version": "1.0.0",
        "name": "simon.js",
        "debug": true,
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36",
        "page": {
            "url": "http://localhost:9000/index.html"
        }
    },
    "partnerSecret": "1294b7e58f37568396b31ce481cf8edc1e6cfcb5",
    "sentAt": 1524776691259,
    "ipAddress": "127.0.0.1",
    "timezone": 240,
    "type": "identify",
    "userId": "97980cfea0067",
    "traits": {
        "name": "test",
        "email": "joe@smith.com",
        "firstName": "Joe",
        "lastName": "Smith",
        "userId": "97980cfea0067",
        "username": "joesmith",
        "properties": {
            "campaignId": "12345"
        }
    }
}

A call to identify establishes the identity associated with a userId. The variable userId is a user identifier that you specify. identify can be called to pass information when a source of identity is recognized, such as an authenticated login, an click from an email with an identity URL parameter, and signup for newsletter subscription. Different types of identifiers can be passed on.

Calling identify does not automatically establish identity for all subsequent track events. Include traits within the track calls to accomplish this.

When a user registers with you for the first time, you should call identify and also make a separate call to registration.

Valid values for the traits dictionary are as follows.

Value	Type	Required	Description
email	String	Yes	The email address of the user (e.g. joe@smith.com).
firstName	String	No	The first name of the user (e.g. Joe).
lastName	String	No	The last name of the user (e.g. Smith).
name	String	No	The full name of the user. (e.g. Joe Smith).
userId	String	No	The user id. (e.g. 97980cfea0067).
userName	String	No	The username (e.g. joesmith).
ARN	String	No	The ARN of the user. Used to sync Simon with Amazon SNS.
properties	Object	No	An object of extra arguments (e.g. { campaignId: '12345' }).

📘
Next-Gen Identity
If your organization is on Next-Gen Identity, you can use any native identifier present in your organization's account. Email address is no longer required.
Next-Gen Identity is currently in a Limited Beta. Most accounts are currently on Legacy Identity unless told otherwise. Contact your account manager for more detail.

A note about identify and AWS SNS. The following fields should be set in your identify call for Simon to properly keep track of SNS identities:

userId: Set this to the internal user id for the user
context.device.type: Set this to the device type of the device to be synced with SNS. The value can be ios,android,kindle, or windows
traits.ARN: Set this to the AWS SNS ARN of the user's device

The track command

A track command may be invoked to pass user-interaction data to Simon Data. These user-interactions are captured by specific events that are documented in this API and are explained in more detail below. Each event has an Event Type specifying the name of the event and an associated Event Object which contains additional metadata about the event.

An example track command for a page_view event:

{
    "partnerId": "804f98b48491143c2e4f2ffea854eb372a41bbfd",
    "clientId": "92adbc3c-c22b-49bf-a9ae-11d9e8b3e6b4",
    "context": {
        "version": "1.0.0",
        "name": "simon.js",
        "debug": true,
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36",
        "page": {
            "url": "http://localhost:9000/index.html"
        }
    },
    "partnerSecret": "1294b7e58f37568396b31ce481cf8edc1e6cfcb5",
    "sentAt": 1524776691259,
    "ipAddress": "timezone": 240,
    "type": "track",
    "properties": {
        "title": "SimonJS Test Page",
        "language": "en-US"
    },
    "event": "page_view"
}

Note that this looks much like the identify call above with the exceptions that the type is track, instead of traits we have properties, and we have an extra parameter called event.

📘
Establishing identity within a 'track' call
Use traits containing userId and email parameters in the payload as a method to establish the identity associated with the track event, as in the below example.

{
    "partnerId": "804f98b48491143c2e4f2ffea854eb372a41bbfd",
    "clientId": "92adbc3c-c22b-49bf-a9ae-11d9e8b3e6b4",
    "context": {
        "version": "1.0.0",
        "name": "simon.js",
        "debug": true,
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36",
        "page": {
            "url": "http://localhost:9000/index.html"
        }
    },
    "partnerSecret": "1294b7e58f37568396b31ce481cf8edc1e6cfcb5",
    "sentAt": 1524776691259,
    "ipAddress": "127.0.0.1",
    "timezone": 240,
    "type": "track",
    "properties": {
        "title": "SimonJS Test Page",
        "language": "en-US"
    },
    "event": "page_view",
    "userId": "97980cfea0067",
    "traits": {
        "name": "test",
        "email": "joe@smith.com",
        "firstName": "Joe",
        "lastName": "Smith",
        "userId": "97980cfea0067",
        "username": "joesmith",
        "properties": {
            "campaignId": "12345"
        }
    }
}

Parameters

The properties that can be specified within the properties object literal vary depending on the event type.

🚧
Using custom properties
The event schema is enforced and events that are missing required properties or include unrecognized properties will be rejected during processing. Using the debug mode during your integration set-up will let you know that this is happening. However, all event types support custom properties within the properties.properties part of the payload (see an example for product view events). The API also supports custom events if there is not a pre-existing matching event type, but make sure to adhere to the schema for those events, too.

Event type	Event object
page_view	none
product_view	productId variant quantity productImageUrl productUrl brand category color productName size style price properties cartItems
add_to_cart	productId variant quantity productImageUrl productUrl brand category color productName size style price properties cartItems
cart	cartItems productId variant quantity productImageUrl productUrl brand category color productName size style price properties
update_cart	productId variant quantity productImageUrl productUrl brand category color productName size style previousQuantity price properties cartItems
remove_from_cart	productId variant quantity productImageUrl productUrl brand category color productName size style price properties cartItems
complete_transaction	transactionId revenue cartItems productId variant quantity productImageUrl productUrl brand category color productName size style price properties shipping tax promotion properties
registration	email username userId optIn firstName lastName properties
favorite	productId variant productImageUrl productUrl brand category color productName size style price properties
waitlist	productId variant quantity productImageUrl productUrl brand category color productName size style price properties
authentication	userId isLoggedIn ARN email properties
custom	eventName requiresIdentity properties