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Braze Track Events API event forwarding extension

Last update: Wed Dec 06 2023 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

CREATED FOR:

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Braze is a customer engagement platform that powers customer-centric interactions between consumers and brands in real time. Using Braze, you can do the following:

  • Deliver data (such as marketing messages) to targeted users based on their language preference, location preference, and more, to increase conversion rates and support key business goals.
  • Send customers personalized messages across multiple channels, including email, push notifications, and in-app messages, at just the right time and in their preferred languages.
  • Target specific users for marketing and promotional campaigns to increase the number of repeat customers.
  • Study user behavior and patterns to target specific audiences with customized messages, which could help increase revenue.

The Braze Track Events API event forwarding extension allows you to leverage data captured in the Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network and send it to Braze in the form of server-side events using the Braze User Track API.

This document covers the use cases of the extension, how to install it in your event forwarding libraries, and how to employ its capabilities in an event forwarding rule.

Use cases

This extension should be used if you want to use data from the Edge Network in Braze to take advantage of its customer analytics and targeting capabilities.

For example, consider a retail organization that has a multichannel presence (website and mobile) and is capturing transactional or conversational input as event data from their website and mobile platforms. Using various tag rules, this data is sent to the Edge Network in real time. From here, the Braze event forwarding extension automatically sends relevant events to Braze from the server side.

Once the data has been sent, the organization’s analytics teams can then leverage Braze’s capabilities to process the datasets and derive business insights to generate graphs, dashboards, or other visualizations to inform business stakeholders. Refer to the Braze customers page for more details of the various use cases of the platform.

Braze prerequisites and guardrails prerequisites

You must have a Braze account in order to use its technologies. If you do not have an account, navigate to the Get Started page on Braze to connect to Braze Sales and start the account creation process.

API guardrails

The extension uses two of Braze’s APIs and their limits are outlined below:

API
Rate Limits
User Track
50,000 requests per minute.
Refer to the User Track API documentation for details.
User Identify
20,000 requests per minute.
Refer to the User Identify API documentation for details.
NOTE
Refer to the guide on Braze API limits for further details on the limits they impose.

Billable data points

Sending additional custom attributes to Braze may increase your Braze data point consumption. Consult with your Braze account manager before sending additional custom attributes. Refer to the Braze documentation on billable data points for more information.

Gather required configuration details configuration-details

In order to connect the Edge Network to Braze, the following inputs are required:

Key Type
Description
Example
Braze Instance
The REST endpoint associated with the Braze account. Refer to the Braze documentation on instances for guidance.
https://rest.iad-03.braze.com
API Key
The Braze API Key associated with the Braze account.
Refer to the Braze documentation on the REST API key for guidance.
YOUR-BRAZE-REST-API-KEY

Create a secret

Create a new event forwarding secret and set the value to your Braze API Key. This will be used to authenticate the connection to your account while keeping the value secure.

Install and configure the Braze extension install

To install the extension, create an event forwarding property or choose an existing property to edit instead.

Select Extensions in the left navigation. In the Catalog tab, select Install on the card for the Braze extension.

Install the Braze extension.

On the next screen, input the following configuration values that you previously gathered from Braze:

  • Braze Rest Endpoint URL: You can enter the value of your Braze rest endpoint URL as plain text in the provided input.
  • API Key: Select the secret data element that you created earlier, which contains your Braze API key.

Select Save when finished.

The Braze extension configuration page.

Create a Send Event rule tracking-rule

After installing the extension, create a new event forwarding rule and configure its conditions as desired. When configuring the actions for the rule, select the Braze extension, then select Send Event for the action type.

Add an event forwarding rule action configuration.

User Identification

Input
Description
External User ID
Long, random and well distributed UUID or GUID. If you choose a different method in which to name your user IDs, they must also be long, random and well distributed. Learn more about suggested user ID naming convention.
Braze User ID
Braze user identifier.
User Alias
An alias serves as an alternative unique user identifier. Use aliases to identify users along different dimensions than your core user ID.

The user alias object consists of two parts: an alias_name for the identifier itself, and an alias_label indicating the type of alias. Users can have multiple aliases with different labels, but only one alias_name per alias_label.
NOTE
For tying the event to an user you need to fill in either the External User ID field, or the Braze User Identifier field or the User Alias section.

Event Data

Input
Description
Required
Event Name ​
Name of the event.
Yes
Event Time
Date-time as string in ISO 8601 or in yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss:SSSZ format.
Yes
App Identifier
The App Identifier or app_id is a parameter associating activity with a specific app in your app group. It designates which app within the app group you are interacting with. Learn more about the API identifier types.
Event Properties ​
A JSON object containing custom properties of the event.
NOTE
The Braze Send Event action requires only an Event Name and Event Time to be specified, but you should be including as much information as possible in the custom properties field. For details on the Braze event object, refer to the official documentation.

User Attributes

User attributes can be a JSON object containing fields that will create or update an attribute with the supplied name and value on the specified user profile. The following properties are supported:

User Attribute
Description
First Name
Last Name
Phone
Email
Gender
One of the following strings: “M”, “F”, “O” (other), “N” (not applicable), “P” (prefer not to say).
City
Country
Country as a string in ISO-3166-1 alpha-2 format.
Language
Language as a string in ISO-639-1 format.
Date of Birth
String in format “YYYY-MM-DD” (e.g., 1980-12-21).
Time Zone
Time zone name from IANA Time Zone Database (e.g., ‘America/New_York’ or ‘Eastern Time (US & Canada)’).
Facebook
Hash containing any of id (string), likes (array of strings), num_friends (integer).
Twitter
Hash containing any of id (integer), screen_name (string, Twitter handle), followers_count (integer), friends_count (integer), statuses_count(integer).

Create a Send Purchase Event rule purchase-rule

After installing the extension, create a new event forwarding rule and configure its conditions as desired. When configuring the actions for the rule, select the Braze extension, then select Send Purchase Event for the action type.

Add a Braze Purchase action type event forwarding rule action configuration.

User Identification

Input
Description
External User ID
Long, random and well distributed UUID or GUID. If you choose a different method in which to name your user IDs, they must also be long, random and well distributed. Learn more about suggested user ID naming convention.
Braze User ID
Braze user identifier.
User Alias
An alias serves as an alternative unique user identifier. Use aliases to identify users along different dimensions than your core user ID.

The user alias object consists of two parts: an alias_name for the identifier itself, and an alias_label indicating the type of alias. Users can have multiple aliases with different labels, but only one alias_name per alias_label.
NOTE
To link the event to a user, you must complete either the External User ID field, the Braze User Identifier field, or the User Alias section.

Purchase Data

Input
Description
Required
Product ID ​
Identifier for the purchase. (e.g., Product Name or Product Category)
Yes
Purchase Time
Date-time as string in ISO 8601 or in yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss:SSSZ format.
Yes
Currency ​
Currency as a string in ISO 4217 Alphabetic Currency Code format.
Yes
Price ​
Price.
Yes
Quantity ​
If not provided, the default value will be 1. The maximum value must be lower than 100.
App Identifier
The App Identifier or app_id is a parameter associating activity with a specific app in your app group. It designates which app within the app group you are interacting with. Learn more about the API identifier types.
Purchase Properties ​
A JSON object containing custom properties of the purchase.
NOTE
The Braze Send Event action requires only an Event Name and Event Time to be specified, but you should include as much information as possible in the custom properties field. For details on the Braze event object, refer to the official documentation.

User Attributes

User attributes can be a JSON object containing fields that will create or update an attribute with the supplied name and value on the specified user profile. The following properties are supported:

User Attribute
Description
First Name
Last Name
Phone
Email
Gender
One of the following strings: “M”, “F”, “O” (other), “N” (not applicable), “P” (prefer not to say).
City
Country
Country as a string in ISO-3166-1 alpha-2 format.
Language
Language as a string in ISO-639-1 format.
Date of Birth
String in format “YYYY-MM-DD” (e.g., 1980-12-21).
Time Zone
Time zone name from IANA Time Zone Database (e.g., ‘America/New_York’ or ‘Eastern Time (US & Canada)’).
Facebook
Hash containing any of id (string), likes (array of strings), num_friends (integer).
Twitter
Hash containing any of id (integer), screen_name (string, Twitter handle), followers_count (integer), friends_count (integer), statuses_count(integer).

Validate data within Braze validate

If the event collection and Adobe Experience Platform integration were successful, you will see events within the Braze console when viewing user profiles. Specifically, the new event data sent to Braze is reflected in the Purchases section of a particular user’s overview tab.

Next steps

This guide covered how to send conversion events to Braze using event forwarding. For more details on downstream applications for event data sent to Braze, refer to the official documentation.

For more information on event forwarding capabilities in Experience Platform, refer to the event forwarding overview.

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