Identify logged in users and send custom properties

Gist gives you the ability to use the rich information about your users to build custom segments, and better target your users to send relevant and useful emails and messages.

• When a user registers
• When a user logs in
• When a user updates their info (when they add a new address, billing method, change plans, etc.)
• Upon loading any pages that are accessible by a logged in user (optional)

How to make the identify call?

convertfox.identify('12345', {
	"email":  "johndoe@example.com"
});
	

Here, the argument for the identify call is a case-sensitive string that uniquely identifies a user, such as an email, database ID, or username. This means no two users in one project may share the same identity. Must be fewer than 255 characters.

Next steps:

Now, that you have identified the user, you should track at least a couple of custom properties. Here you can learn how to track custom properties for each user.

Many products include some sort of tiered pricing plans. Using  Gist .identify to attach this information to your users' Gist profiles can help you target those users and send relevant messages.

When someone visits Gist, we pull their account plan from our database and include that into an identify call like this:

convertfox.identify("12345", {
	"email":  "johndoe@example.com", 
	"plan": "Pro"
});

This allows you to filter your user list and send messages when users meet criteria specific to your business. The sky is the limit. For instance, you could add custom properties such as "number of projects completed", or "number of incomplete tasks" etc, and Gist tracks those for you and makes them available for you to filter your users and create more specific segments of users.

So, how to send custom properties to Gist?

You can send custom attributes by adding them to  your  Gist .identify code snippet as additional key/value pairs. Make sure to double check that your custom attribute keys always have a JSON-valid value - double quotes around strings and sending null as a value when there isn't a value for that user.

Also, here are some important directions:

• Field names must not contain Periods ('.') or Dollar ('$')
• Field values must be JSON Strings, Numbers or Booleans. Objects and Arrays will be rejected.
• Keys cannot contain special characters such as ~`!@#%^&*'{}|\'"  or even the NULL character.
• Keys are case-sensitive.
• Values cannot be nested hashes or arrays.
• Only custom data attributes of string type are allowed to have up to 255 characters.

Here are some custom attribute examples:

convertfox.identify("12345", { 
	"email":  "johndoe@tacos.com", 
	"name": "John Doe",
 	"subdomain":  "app", // Put quotes around text strings
 	"active_accounts": 1872, // Send numbers without quotes
 	"last_paid_at" : 1283495946, // Send dates in unix timestamp format and end key names with "_at"
 	"teammates":  null, // Send null when no value exists for a user
        "tags": "Free, popular", // Multiple tags can be added separated by comma
        "overwrite_tags": false // Defaults to true. If set to false, will merge the tags
});

Once you have your attributes added to Gist, you can head over to the ‘People’ page and apply filters based on custom properties, the same way you would with standard properties.

Special Properties

Gist defines a list of common properties that are useful to track: