IBM Universal Behavior Exchange Destination

Destination Info

• Accepts Page, and Track calls
• In Cloud-mode, refer to it as IbmUbx, or IBM UBX in the Integrations object

Components

• Server

Connection Modes

Device-mode	Cloud-mode
Web	Web
Mobile	Mobile
Server	Server

IBM’s Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX) is an API that allows users to share customer interactions, behaviors, and target audiences among IBM solutions and applications - including the Watson Marketing Portfolio - without the need for custom software integration. In effect, UBX is the “Segment” of IBM’s ecosystem. Once data is routed to IBM, you can send it to any destination in UBX’s portfolio.

Getting started

1. From the Segment web app, click Catalog.
2. Search for “IBM UBX” in the Catalog, select it, and choose which of your sources to connect the destination to.
3. Enter your UBX API URL and your publisher’s endpoint authentication key in the Segment Settings UI. You should receive an email with this URL after setting up your UBX account. If you can’t locate your URL, contact UBX support.

   Note: The URL is also referred to as a “base URL” in the IBM UBX documentation. To locate your endpoint authentication key, navigate to the Endpoints tab in UBX, click on the three dots symbol, and select Endpoint details.

4. Register and provision a Segment endpoint within your UBX dashboard so you can access the appropriate endpoint authentication key. To do this, go to Endpoints > Register a new endpoint and select “Segment”. Click Register to proceed.

   

5. Once registered, the new endpoint’s status will remain “Pending” in the Endpoints tab until it has been activated. To activate an endpoint, include your UBX account’s API URL and your endpoint authentication key in an email to Segment using the tech support form.

6. Segment activates your endpoint within 24 hours, at which time its status updates to “Active” in the UBX dashboard. Now, you can grab your endpoint authentication key again and paste it into your UBX settings in the Segment UI.

General tracking advice

Segment encourages customers to review UBX’s dynamic event library to become familiar with UBX’s specced events and properties. Many UBX consumers only accept specific events; likewise, many consumers function best when specific events include particular properties. Although Segment provides robust out-of-the-box mapping, Segment still recommends reviewing the dynamic event library closely to ensure that you are sending events and properties that enable you to get the most out of your UBX consumers.

Page

Page calls send a ‘Page View Event’ to UBX (code ibmpageView). The following mappings might apply:

Note: As with Track events, all properties sent by the user that aren’t mapped are sent as attributes to UBX. To send a UBX-specced property that isn’t mapped, set the Segment property name to the UBX property code directly (for example, pageID). You can find UBX-specific event and property codes in their dynamic event library.

Track

Segment’s integration with UBX supports all public recognized UBX event types. Beware, UBX event destinations only receive events to which they are subscribed. To subscribe a UBX destination to events from the Segment publisher, navigate to the Events tab and select “Subscribe to events”.

Make sure that you subscribe your UBX event subscriber endpoints to the events you’d like them to consume from the Segment publisher.

Note that while Segment supports all UBX-specced events, the following Segment-specced events and their properties have been mapped to their UBX equivalents:

Event mappings

Mobile

Events

No specific mobile property mappings are defined at this time, given that Segment’s spec and UBX’s spec do not share closely related mobile properties. You can still pass in any attribute codes as defined in UBX’s dynamic event library, and Segment passes these values downstream.

Ecommerce

Events

Attributes

Video

Events

Attributes

Email

Events

Attributes

Property mappings

Segment also maps some properties from the context object to their equivalent UBX attributes. Note that UBX only supports a few data types - string, number, boolean and date. Segment automatically discards any properties of a type not mentioned here, with the exception of objects, which Segment attempts to stringify. If this isn’t possible, you can expect to see [object Object] appear as the value in UBX.

Integration-specific option mapping

Segment maps the following integration-specific options to UBX:

An event containing all three integration-specific options might look like this:

analytics.track('Order Completed' {
  // properties
}, {
  integrations: {
    'ibm-ubx': {
      channel: 'crm',
      subChannel: 'chat',
      contactConsent: 'email,opt-in'
    }
  }
})

It’s important to note some information about precedent for each of these options:

• channel: Segment first checks whether this value is defined in integration-specific options. If not and if analytics-android or analytics-ios libraries are detected,channel is set to mobile; for all other libraries, channel is set to web.
• subChannel: This value is not appended to the outgoing payload unless explicity defined by the user.
• ContactConsent: This value is not appended to the outgoing payload unless explicity defined by the user. The value passed to Segment must be in the format channel,subscriptionOption. At the moment, the only acceptable channels are email and sms, and the only two acceptable subscription options are opt-in and opt-out.

FAQ

Why isn’t the data from Segment appear in UBX?

• Ensure your Segment publisher endpoint is “Active”. If not, see the getting started steps.
• Ensure you’ve subscribed your UBX destinations to the appropriate events.

Troubleshooting

Segment does not auto-generate events other than an initial page call when using our Analytics.js library and mobile lifecycle events when mobile lifecycle tracking is enabled using Segment’s Android or iOS library.

This means some events supported and in some cases expected by downstream UBX destinations - including abandonment events - must be derived by the customer. One approach would be to integrate with a marketing tool such as Braze or Bronto, in which you can set up rules that generate abandonment events, which are then be sent back through Segment and downstream to UBX.

Another approach may be to schedule a cron job in your database that checks for users who have triggered a Product Added event, but who never went on to trigger an Order Completed event. In this case, you can assume that the user abandoned his cart, therefore, you should trigger a server-side Segment event based on this rule, which Segment will process and pass downstream to UBX.

Segment’s integration with UBX supports the following UBX abandonment events:

• ibmabandonedConversion
• ibmbrowseAbandonment
• ibmbrowseAbandonmentItem
• ibmcartAbandonment
• ibmcartAbandonmentItem

Engage

You can send computed traits and audiences generated using Engage to this destination as a user property. To learn more about Engage, schedule a demo.

For user-property destinations, an identify call is sent to the destination for each user being added and removed. The property name is the snake_cased version of the audience name, with a true/false value to indicate membership. For example, when a user first completes an order in the last 30 days, Engage sends an Identify call with the property order_completed_last_30days: true. When the user no longer satisfies this condition (for example, it’s been more than 30 days since their last order), Engage sets that value to false.

When you first create an audience, Engage sends an Identify call for every user in that audience. Later audience syncs only send updates for users whose membership has changed since the last sync.

Settings

Segment lets you change these destination settings from the Segment app without having to touch any code.