| Audience | How you'll use this article |
|---|---|
| Marketing | Understand what event data is used for and how it supports activation, personalization, and experimentation. |
| Data teams | Learn how events are collected, structured, stored, and reused across analytics and activation workflows. |
| Engineering | Understand the event model, ingestion paths, and how Events fits into your data architecture. |
Hightouch Events collects customer behavior from websites, mobile apps, and backend systems, then stores that data in your warehouse. Teams can use the same event data to analyze behavior, build audiences, trigger journeys, and power real-time workflows.
What you'll learn
- What Events does and how it works
- Core features: sources, destinations, and syncs
- How to get started
- When to use Events
- How Events connects to other Hightouch products
Overview
Hightouch Events lets you collect customer behavior from your website, app, or backend systems and store it in your warehouse. Once events are flowing, you can use that data to build audiences, trigger journeys, measure campaigns, and power real-time personalization.
An event is a customer action, such as viewing a product, completing a purchase, or updating an account. Each event includes properties and identity information that describe who performed the action and what happened. Hightouch validates and structures events before sending them to your warehouse or other destinations, so you can trust the data everywhere it's used.
Hightouch Events handles two related jobs:
- Collect and store — You instrument your app or website with Hightouch SDKs or connect a streaming platform, and Events writes the data to your warehouse in a consistent schema. From there, you can use it for analytics, audience building, or modeling.
- Stream and activate — You can also send events directly to downstream tools in real time — for example, triggering a welcome email when someone signs up, updating a CRM record after a purchase, or personalizing a page based on what a visitor just browsed. Events stored in your warehouse are available in Customer Studio as audience filters and journey triggers.
Core features
Event sources
Event sources are where events come from. Hightouch provides SDKs for browser, iOS, Android, Node.js, and other platforms, plus an HTTP API for server-side ingestion and connectors for streaming platforms like Kafka and Google Pub/Sub.
Event destinations
Event destinations are where events go. You can write events to your warehouse for analytics and modeling, or stream events to downstream tools like your email platform, CRM, or analytics service.
Event syncs
Event syncs define how events move between sources and destinations — which events are sent, how they're filtered, and how data is mapped.
Governance and transformation
Use data contracts to enforce event schemas and catch violations before bad data reaches your warehouse. Use functions to update events before they reach a destination — for example, rename properties, filter events, or add fields to the event data.
Get started
Events is usually implemented by engineering and data teams. If you're ready to start implementing tracking, see Get started with Hightouch Events for the step-by-step implementation guide.
If you're migrating from another event collection tool (such as Segment or RudderStack), see the Migration guide. During migration, you can keep existing tracking API call patterns and run systems in parallel.
When to use Events
Use Events when you need to collect behavioral data from your app, website, or backend systems and store it in your warehouse. For activating warehouse data that's already been collected and modeled, use Reverse ETL or Customer Studio instead.
| Scenario | Recommended approach |
|---|---|
| Collect behavioral data from websites, apps, or backend systems | Events |
| Write event data to your warehouse for analytics and modeling | Events warehouse destinations |
| Stream events to downstream tools in real time | Events event streaming |
| Enforce event schemas and catch data quality issues | Events data contracts |
| Build audiences using behavioral event data | Customer Studio — uses Events data as audience filters |
| Respond to user behavior during an active session | Real-Time — evaluates audience membership using live events |
| Sync modeled warehouse data to business tools | Reverse ETL |
How Events fits into Hightouch
Events collects the behavioral data that other Hightouch products use for audiences, journeys, analytics, and personalization.
What Events uses
- Your app or website — Events collects behavioral data using SDKs embedded in your client or server code.
- Streaming platforms — Events can capture data from Kafka and Google Pub/Sub for server-side events.
What Events sends
- Event data to your warehouse — Events writes behavioral data to your warehouse in a consistent schema, where you can use it for analytics, audience building, and modeling.
- Real-time events to downstream tools — Events can stream data directly to destinations for time-sensitive workflows, such as triggering messages, updating records, or personalizing experiences as actions happen.
- Behavioral signals to Customer Studio — Event data stored in your warehouse can be used as audience filters, trait inputs, and journey triggers in Customer Studio.
- Real-time inputs to AI Decisioning — Events can feed behavioral signals into AI Decisioning agents as real-time inputs for decisioning and personalization.