Adding Contacts With A Little Sourcery (using the customSource property)

If you use the API to add or update your contacts, you may have wondered what that customSource property in the contactObject was. Wonder no more. This post will explain what the customSource property is.

When you add a contact through the API, or through any other means for that matter, we note in the contact's record how the contact was added, in other words, it's source. Look up any contact in the Bronto web app and you'll see one of the following for contacts that were added through a webform and an API session respectively.  

The customSource field can be read or updated through the API, and if you do choose to set it, you will see something like below. 

You could include the title of the page from which the contact was added. You might have several back-end processes that add contacts and you would like your marketers to be able to quickly see how a contact was added. You can think of this like a free field to store this information. Unfortunately, you won't be able to segment off of this field, however you can filter on it directly through the API.

So, if you want to view this extra information in the application, it's simple enough to add the customSource to your add contact API requests. Let us know what you think or if you have any questions or comments.

Alex Durzy
Support Engineer at Bronto