Managing activities

The Activities page provides you with access to all activities currently configured in Ortto, which allows you to view a specific activity and edit it.

View an activity

To view a configured activity:

  1. On the Activities page, click the activity to view.
  2. On the specific activity view page, click the appropriate option (OverviewActivityAudience, and Location along the top-right) to view more information about the activity’s details, along with the people who conducted them, and the location.

Edit the activity

You can also edit a number of the activity’s aspects from the activity’s page.

Settings

Under Settings you can enable or disable Client-side data sourceTrack as touch and Conversion value, and edit your Data retention period. Learn more about editing data retention under Configuring an activity’s data retention period.

To edit Client-side data sourceTrack as touch and Conversion value, click Edit and select or deselect the checkboxes as required.

NOTE: Rate limits apply to client-side data source activity creation. For each activity (based on the activity_ID), we allow a maximum of:

  • 10 activity events per contact per day.
  • 100 activity events per hour, per activity IP address (source_IP).

Learn more about client-side data source under Creating a new activity.

Learn more about the touch attribution models under Attribution model and conversion value under Value label in Attribution.

Configuring an activity’s data retention period

By default, the data for all built in (system) and custom activities you create (and their attributes) are only retained in Ortto for 90 days. This ultimately affects your ability to:

  • see these activities in feeds under your customer data platform (CDP) people profiles, data sources etc.,
  • filter data based on these activities and attributes, and
  • create new reports based on these activities.

The effects of activities such as aggregated fields, daily reports, etc. however, continue on beyond this period.

Nevertheless, this default 90 day limit means that Ortto does not have to retain this data that in many or most cases passes its period of usefulness, which would otherwise impair the performance of filters, journeys, audiences and other areas of Ortto over time.

In some cases, however, it may be necessary to store an activity and its attribute data for longer. Therefore, Ortto provides a mechanism for customers to opt-in to selectively store their activity data for longer.

Extending data retention past 90 days enables you to:

NOTE: If your activity has been created from a data source, you will need to configure data retention for these activities from the data source itself. Learn more about this in Configuring data retention (for data source activities).

To configure an activity’s data retention for a period beyond 90 days:

  1. On the activity view page, click Settings > Edit.
  2. Choose the Store activity data for and then specify the period of time to store this activity’s data in the drop-down.
  3. Click Save.
Example data retention configuration for an activity

Custom activity design

You have control over how custom activities you send to Ortto are displayed.

The 3 options available to you.

The first option, "Activity" will simply display the activity name, so for example: James Smith placed order.

The second allows you to pick an attribute from the activity you send in and will display that along with the name, for example: James Smith placed order #456.

The final option, the advanced option is what requires further explanation. This allows you to use a simple template to display whatever you like out of the available data.

An example of this syntax is: Placed order #{{attribute.order_id}} from the {{attribute.category}} category.

Data destinations

In this section you can select a webhook to send activity data to. Events associated with the activity are sent to your webhook when they occur. You can view the webhook actions on the webhook’s view, under Logs (accessed via Data sources > your webhook).

The webhook payload is determined by your webhook configuration (such as the Fields you configured). Learn more about creating a webhook under Configuring a webhook.

NOTE: Data destinations is only available on selected Ortto plans (see outbound activity streams).

Conversion destinations

The conversion destinations feature enables you to send system, data source (such as Shopify) and custom activity events to your Google Ads account.

Once you have enabled conversion destinations for a particular activity, events associated with the activity can be sent as conversion data to Google Ads. This allows you to create ad campaigns in Google Ads linked to the custom conversion action sent from Ortto.

The way that Ortto sends conversion data depends on 2 events occurring:

  • A contact clicks your Google ad within the click-through conversion window period you set (e.g. 30 days), and
  • The contact performs the activity you have enabled with conversion destinations (e.g. places an order in your store, where Placed order is the activity you have conversion destinations enabled for).

Once these two activities have occurred in the required time period, Ortto processes then sends the conversion data to be captured in your Google Ads console, under Conversions, as a Conversion action.

NOTE:

  • Ortto will only send conversion data to the Google Ads for activity events that are associated with a contact in your CDP. Anonymous conversion events will not be sent to Google Ads.
  • You can enable conversion destinations on up to 5 activities.

To enable conversion destinations:

  1. Click Add destination.
  2. Select the Ad network (e.g. Google Ads).
  3. Add a name (required) and a description (optional) for your conversion activity, then choose the Category.
  4. Click Show advanced options to configure your category settings as required. Learn more about attribution models under Attribution model in Attribution.
  5. Click OK to complete the conversion destination setup.

NOTE:

  • Where an activity has a monetary value, such as with a Placed order-type activity, the value of the activity will be stored as the conversion Value you select in the conversion destination setup. If Use different values for each conversion is selected, the Conversion value attribute will be set to Price and the monetary value of the activity will be the conversion value (e.g. $1).
  • Otherwise, select Use the same value for each conversion to set a conversion value (or Don’t use value to not record a value).
Example Google conversion action showing conversion setup details

IMPORTANT:

  • There is a wait time imposed by Google that means after a custom conversion action is first created in Ortto (the first time you enable Conversion destinations for a particular activity), it takes 6 hours until activity events are uploaded to your Google Ads account.
  • Once the custom conversion action is created, each time a conversion event is recorded, it will take around 3 to 6 hours for the data to appear in your Google Ads account.

How does user association work for conversion destinations?

Conversion events are registered for any user that can be associated with an Ortto contact.

For example, you run an e-commerce business selling home decor via Shopify and you create your ad campaigns using Google Ads. You’ve integrated your Shopify account with Ortto and placed a capture form on your website. You want to send customer purchase data to Google Ads, so you enable Conversion destinations for Google Ads in the Shopify Placed order activity in your Ortto account.

From this scenario, Ortto can associate the customer with the conversion in 2 ways:

  • When the customer completes the capture form and makes a purchase on your site, the data submitted in the form (e.g. name, email address) is associated with the person’s web session and the activity (Placed order), and can be sent as a conversion.
  • If the customer does not fill in the capture form but makes a purchase, Ortto can identify the person based on the data included in the checkout process (e.g. name, email address) because you have Shopify integrated with your Ortto account. This placed order can also be sent as a conversion.

Export activity data

You can export your activity data with selected contact fields as attributes.

To do so, on the activity view:

  1. Click Actions > Export activity data.
  2. If required, select contact fields to add as activity attributes.
  3. Click Export. You’ll receive an email with a link which will download a .jsonl file with your activity data.

NOTE:

  • For each activity, you can export activity data once per 24 hours.
  • You can add up to 10 contact fields to the activity data export.