New Feature: Aimtell Alias

Rolling out today is a new feature that will make it easier than ever to programmatically send highly targeted notifications to your subscribers. Introducing the Aimtell Alias.

Alias enables you to associate another username, user id or email with a particular subscriber providing a simplified way to send server-side requests to track attributes, events or send notifications against a specific subscriber.

To best demonstrate this, let’s pretend you run a popular website that allows users to stream movies for a small monthly fee.

User MovieLover27 visits your website and subscribes to push notifications. A few days later you want to make a note that MovieLover27’s watched the incredible Comedy movie, Get Out. (Yes, according to Rotten Tomatoes, it’s a Comedy movie. Go figure. )

Traditionally, you could take care of this by tracking Custom Events while MovieLover27 is on your site. But maybe he watched it on his Desktop and only subscribed to notifications on his Android. Dang!

In that case, you’d previously need to:

1. Create a database on your server that stores Aimtell’s subscriber id with your user’s username.
2. Create a server endpoint that listens for calls with username and subscriber id that inserts it into your database.
3. Create a javascript function that will pull the MovieLover27’s subscriber id (i.e. a2b31616-7db3-e6cc-ec21-308221b1bfb0) when he logs into your site and send a call to your server to associate the two in the database.
4. Later, when attempting to track the data, send a call to your database to lookup the subscriber id for MovieLover27.
5. Take that subscriber id found in step 4 (i.e a2b31616-7db3-e6cc-ec21-308221b1bfb0) and send a POST to Aimtell’s API using that subscriber id with the desired attributes/events.

Possible? Certainly. More tedious than needed? Definitely.

Now, with Alias, you can simply:

1. Trigger the alias javascript snippet to associate Aimtell subscriber id a2b31616-7db3-e6cc-ec21-308221b1bfb0 with username MovieLover27.
2. Send a POST anytime to Aimtell’s API targeting username MovieLover27 with the desired attributes/events.

That’s it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. (That’s still a saying, right?)

If you’d like to give it a go, check out the documentation found here. One quick note: you may need to update your javascript snippet on your website in order to take advantage of this new feature. We update the primary tracking code on average less than once per year, but this is just one of those times.

To check if you’re on the latest version of the tracking code, simply check out the version number under View Websites > Edit > Installation. (screenshot). As long as you’re above version 3.933 you’re good to go.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to your account manager or create a support ticket within the dashboard.