Events overview

Overview

Hightouch Events collects customer behavior from websites, mobile apps, and backend systems and centralizes that data in your data warehouse. You can then reuse the same events across analytics, activation, and real-time workflows.

Events represent meaningful actions, such as viewing a product, completing a purchase, or updating an account. Each event includes properties and identity information, and Events applies consistent definitions and identity rules so the data stays reliable as it moves to downstream tools.

This article explains what Events are, what you’ll use them for, and how they fit into Hightouch.

If you’re ready to start implementing tracking, see
→ Get started with Hightouch Events

Use cases

• Analytics
  Analyze customer behavior, measure campaign performance, and identify trends and opportunities.

• Marketing personalization
  Power personalized messaging and experiences based on recent and historical behavior.

• Operational workflows
  Trigger actions such as sending emails, updating CRM records, or routing events to internal systems.

• AI Decisioning and machine learning
  Train and evaluate models for use cases such as churn prediction, product recommendations, propensity scoring, and fraud detection.

Core building blocks

Hightouch Events has three core building blocks that make up collection to activation.

Event sources

Where events come from.
Examples include browser SDKs, mobile SDKs, server-side SDKs, HTTP APIs, and streaming platforms.

Event destinations

Where events go.
Destinations can store events in your warehouse or forward events to downstream tools.

Event syncs

How events move between sources and destinations.
Each sync defines which events are sent, how they’re filtered, and how data is mapped.

What you can do after events are collected

Once events are flowing into Hightouch, you can:

• Store events in your warehouse for analytics and modeling
• Stream events to destinations in real time for time-sensitive workflows
• Build audiences and traits using event data in Customer Studio
• Apply governance rules with data contracts
• Transform events in-flight using event functions
• Use events in AI Decisioning as real-time signals

How Events fits into the rest of Hightouch

Hightouch Events integrates with other parts of the platform:

• Customer Studio: build audiences, traits, and journeys using event data
• Reverse ETL: sync modeled event data from the warehouse to downstream tools
• Identity Resolution: apply consistent identity rules across event and warehouse data
• AI Decisioning: use events as real-time inputs for decisioning and personalization

Migrating to Hightouch Events

Use Hightouch Events when you need more control and flexibility over how event data is collected, governed, and activated. Benefits include:

• Flexible event schemas
  Define and evolve event schemas without being constrained by predefined models.

• Composable architecture
  Run event collection on your own data infrastructure, with modular components that integrate with existing tools and workflows.

• Simple, consistent tracking APIs
  Instrument events using a straightforward API that focuses on what to track, while keeping downstream behavior configurable.

• Warehouse-first data flow
  Centralize event data in the warehouse so it can be reused across analytics, activation, and machine learning use cases.

• Enterprise governance and observability
  Apply data contracts, version control, and monitoring to maintain quality and visibility as event volume grows.

• Migration-friendly implementation
  Keep existing tracking APIs (for example, Segment- or RudderStack-style calls) and run systems in parallel during migration.

Hightouch Events supports both real-time activation and warehouse-based analysis from the same underlying event data.

If you are migrating, see the Migration guide.

What to do next

If you’re new to Events, start with the step-by-step implementation guide:

→ Get started with Hightouch Events

→ Migrate to Hightouch Events.