Getting Started
Welcome to Innkeepr! This doc walks you through each of the tasks to set up your workspace and become familiar with Innkeepr.
The guide is divided into three sections:
Installation: Set up data sources to send data to Innkeepr.
Audiences: Create your first audiences.
Integration: Support marketing campaigns using your audiences.
Installation
The installation tasks cover how to send and debug your initial data from a Source (a library that sends data to Innkeepr).
Key Installation Tasks:
Add Innkeepr.js and Other Sources
Add Conversion Tracking
Testing and Debugging
About Innkeepr.js and other Sources
Innkeepr.js is the starting point of every installation. It automatically captures page events from your shop or web app and sends it to the Innkeepr servers. Additionally Innkeepr.js provides building blocks for identifying users and capturing conversion events in the form of Identify and Track methods.
Install Innkeepr.js
Innkeepr.js can be installed with a custom subdomain or as an external third-party service. A full installation of Innkeepr.js is documented in our basic installation guide.
Add more Sources
A Source is a website, server library, mobile SDK, or cloud application which can send data to Innkeepr. It’s where your data originates. Add a Source to collect data to understand who your customers are and how they’re using your product. Create a source for each website or app you want to track.
To add a Source:
Go to Sources.
Click Add Source.
Click the Source you’d like to add. Note: More than 80% of workspaces start by adding their JavaScript website (see Innkeepr.js).
Enter any information on the setup page.
Click Save Source.
Add conversion tracking
Conversion events represent key user actions beyond simple page views. Innkeepr’s Track call captures these actions along with any relevant properties that describe the behavior. Sending a Track call is essential for building audiences, as Innkeepr's audiences are specifically tailored around events collected through these calls.
Testing and Debugging
The Event Debugger is a real-time tool that helps you validate API calls made from your website, mobile app, or servers arrive at Innkeepr. You can use the Event Debugger to make sure that your sources function properly and your events are actively sent.
The Raw view is the complete JSON object Innkeepr receives from the calls you send. These calls include all the details about what is tracked: timestamps, properties, traits, ids, and contextual information Innkeepr automatically collects the moment the data is sent.
To access your Source Debugger:
Navigate to Events.
Filter incoming events by Type, Name or Payload.
Audiences
Audiences are an integral part of Innkeepr. Through audiences you can engage with your most relevant users (or similar ones) across various platforms. After you've installed Innkeepr.js you can build audiences for customer acquisition, retargeting and spend supression and sync them directly into your marketing channels.
Types, Goals & Treatments
Audiences have a couple of configuration elements you can configure in order to tailor them around your specific needs:
Types - we support three audience types: seeds, retargeting and exclusions
Goals - the conversion goal you'd want to reach with your audience
Treatments - similar historic campaigns the audience initially can learn from
Types
Types help to define the purpose for each audience. We currently support three types:
Seed - used for better lookalikes or audience signals
Retargeting - used to retarget previous visitors, cart abonders or existing customers
Exclusion - used to keep irrelevant traffic away from your site
Types have significant an impact on how audiences are composed with regards to size, sampling and update cycles. Therefore we do not recommend using audiences in not-intented use cases.
Goals
Goals define the user action you'd like to reach with your audience. You can use every standard or custom event - from page view to checkout completed - as a potential audience goal.
Treatments
Audiences learn through a mechanism called Audience Optimization. It's an approach to learn from traffic of your shop or web app in real-time and compose audiences based on users that are most relevant for specific campaign.
Treatments are a way to initially tailor audiences for specific campaigns. They are an abstract equivalent of what you know as ad sets, asset groups, or ad groups that live in your Google, Meta and TikTok accounts. You can add treatments of a similar existing campaign to an audience during the setup to help the audience learn from historic data.
Creating your first audience
To create an Audience:
Go to Audiences.
Click Create.
Enter a Name.
Select the Source the Audience shall be uploaded to.
Chose a Conversion Goal the Audience will be optimized for.
Select the Audience type.
(Optional) Select historic campaigns for initital training data.
Click Create.
That's it. Once created, Innkeepr frequently checks if enough data available to provide your audience and you will be notified, once the audience has been populated with users within your marketing tool.
Integration
Innkeepr allows you to sync audience directly into a variety of marketing tools. This guide will give a more in depth explanation how the sync works and how to use audiences properly across your marketing stack.
Targeting Events
Innkeepr uses events to dynamically compose audiences across your marketing tool stack. These "innkeepr_targeting" events are available on all platforms integrated with Innkeepr.
For each audience, Innkeepr emits separate targeting events, including an individual user ID, (which is Innkeepr's anonymous ID), as well as an audience ID. That way we link a user to a specific audience through an audience event listener, also known as audience rule.
Example:
// sample targeting event
{
name: "innkeepr_targeting_AUDIENCE_ID"
user: "USER_ID"
audience: "AUDIENCE_ID"
}This process is fully automated, so once an audience is created, Innkeepr begins emitting the relevant targeting events, which can then be seamlessly used in your marketing tools.
Audience Usage Guidelines
A few words on audience types
To achieve optimal results, it's essential to use each audience type as intended.
Seed Audiences: Primarily used for lookalike creation, identifying relevant users within your audience. An exception is when using seed audiences with Google Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, where they can also enhance targeting.
Exclusion Audiences: Designed to filter out users less likely to convert, these should only be used as exclusion lists to improve campaign efficiency by focusing on high-quality prospects.
Using audiences for multiple campaigns
While reusing an audience across different campaigns might seem efficient, Innkeepr’s audience optimization is designed to learn from specific touchpoints created by each campaign.
Reusing audiences across too many campaigns can reduce precision. It’s worth considering a long-term campaign setup that aligns with how audiences are intended to be used to maintain effectiveness.
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