Send VEX data to your marketing automation platform

PathFactory VEX leverages many of the same integrations that are a part of the core PathFactory platform. In the case of VEX, it will pass registration and deep attendee engagement data to your important systems of record, such as marketing automation platforms (MAPs), CRMs, or other systems. This article will focus on how to pass data from VEX to platforms such as a MAP using webhooks.

For PathFactory customers who already use Campaign Tools (Content Tracks and Explore Pages) with a webhook integration, it’s important to note that VEX leverages the exact same set of webhooks. For example if you already send engagement data to a MAP via webhooks, VEX event engagement data will flow through the same webhooks freely. Because of this, if you are already a PathFactory Campaign Tools customer it’s important you consider how Virtual Event engagement data is separated out from Campaign Tools engagement data on systems you’ve connected PathFactory to.

For more information on the data points you should expect from your VEX event, see VEX Webhook Field Definitions.

To ensure the traffic to your VEX event can be associated back to a lead or contact record in your MAP, it’s important to understand Registration and Sending Attendees to VEX.

If you are using VEX’s built-in registration feature, you can automatically push registrants to your MAP using our Form Capture Webhook. To learn more about configuring our Form Capture Webhook and connecting it your other platforms please see our support article on Integrations.

The PathFactory Form Capture Webhook has many fields, some of which are used by VEX, others are not. For more information on which data points you should expect from each field in your VEX event see VEX Webhook Field Definitions.

When registrants complete the event registration form, you should expect the Form Capture webhook to fire within approximately 2 minutes, sending registration data to your MAP for that visitor. Occasionally this can take longer if there are backlogs of many simultaneous registrations. Typically PathFactory VEX customers would have a campaign/workflow/program in their MAP which triggers based on the webhook having fired, and is filtered based on a webhook field returning a unique value for the event such as Experience Name (The Event Name) or Experience External ID (External ID set on the Event Setup).

For example, to build a Marketo Smart Campaign to add registrants to a program or static list you could:

1. Build a Smart Campaign that is triggered based on the Form Capture Webhook being fired (“Fills out Form” being the form the Webhook is configured to fire from).
2. Add a filter to the Smart List in the Smart Campaign based on the Experience Name or Experience External ID.
3. Set the flow step to take the required action on the attendee (add as a member of a program or to a static list).

All attendee engagement data can be sent to your MAP via the PathFactory Visitor Session Webhook. This sends a record of who attended the VEX event, and how deeply they engaged (which sessions they visited, which supplemental content they viewed, and how long they spent doing so). VEX treats each visit to your event (across one or more sessions) as one unified visitor session. So you should expect the Visitor Session webhook data approximately 30 minutes after a visitor closes their window or goes inactive in your event. The webhook contains all attendee engagement data across all of the sessions they attended in your event while they had the tab open and remained active. If the attendee accessed your event multiples times the Visitor Session Webhooks will fire multiple times for the attendee. To learn more about configuring our Visitor Session Webhook and connecting it your other platforms see Integrations.

The PathFactory Visitor Session Webhook has many fields, some of which are used by VEX, others are not. For more information on which data points you should expect to see in each field for your VEX event see VEX Webhook Field Definitions.

It’s important to decide how you wish to store information on your event attendance well in advance of your first VEX event. Some teams may wish to have one big program/campaign in a MAP and/or CRM for the entire event. Using this approach you could still store attendees to specific sessions as a static list.

Alternatively, you may wish to have a parent program/campaign for the whole event with many different child programs/campaigns for each unique event or session. While this requires more Marketing Operations set-up, reporting, scoring, analytics and connection to CRM all become stronger.

Event Attendees

To add attendees to an event contact list in your MAP, you utilize the the Visitor Session Webhook being fired. Next set up a filter to where the Experience Name matches your event name or the Experience External ID matches the External ID you’ve set in your Event Setup.

You have the option of ensuring the event attendee has spent at least a minimum threshold of time. You do this by filtering on the Engagement Time field. This field is in seconds, so if you wanted to only count attendees who spent greater than 5 minutes in your event as having truly attended, then you should look for people who had a value greater than 300 in their Visitor Session Webhook Engagement Time field.

Session Attendance

To determine if an attendee or group of attendees attended a specific session start by determining that session’s unique URL slug, as defined in the Session Setup. To determine who visited that specific session, create a filter in your MAP or CRM based on the Content Journey field containing the slug for that session. It’s important to use a contains statement because this field can contain many slugs for different sessions and even the slug of pieces of supplemental content a visitor saw. Note: the slug of a piece of supplemental content is set in the Content Library.

To determine a visitor who spent at least a minimum threshold of time on the specific session, first make sure you have configured an appropriate value in the Engagement Time field in Session Details. Then in the Visitor Session Webhook, filter/trigger based on the Content List – Time Thresholds Met field containing the slug for that session. As above it’s important to use a contains statement because this field can contain many slugs for different sessions and even the slug of pieces of supplemental content a visitor saw.

A common way for VEX customers to classify their session attendees is with one program/campaign per session where anyone who attended the session at all, has a member status of “attended session” and then can hit a higher status (eg. ‘attended – engaged’, or ‘attended – threshold met’) if they meet the time threshold for the session as described in the Event Attendees section above. That way, from a Marketing Operations perspective, different actions can be taken on attendees that meet a time threshold versus those who only attended the session for a short time. Examples of how this data can be useful are, larger score bumps for meeting a session time threshold, sending a certification for truly attending a session, or segmenting an audience differently for future campaigns knowing that they actually watched a particular session.