Field types
Whether they are user fields, event fields or statistic fields, declaring your fields in Webmarketer means declaring their type.
Why declare field types?
At Webmarketer, we believe data must serve marketing, and that high quality in the data you collect makes it far more usable in your future targeting and analyses.
While it is technically possible to ingest your data raw, without extracting any meaning from it, that mode of collection would prevent you from making the most of the data and from building a consistent data model.
Whether it is catchment areas, socio-professional categories or multi-currency revenue comparisons, your data, when collected rigorously and consistently, will yield valuable targeting and analysis insights.
Our team, with 10 years of experience building data-driven acquisition setups for our customers, can support you in designing and implementing a consistent data model.
8 field types
Webmarketer offers 8 field types:
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Text fields collect textual data, for example:
- Last name
- First name
- Message
The values sent for text fields:
- can contain any Unicode character
- must not exceed the 4096-character limit (the string sent is truncated beyond that)
Using text fields to store structured information carrying specific semantics is discouraged.
For example, if you plan to collect a user's city/postal code, email address or phone number,
prefer the Location, Email address and Phone number types respectively.
Some field types, such as location, get special treatment when it comes to anonymization or reporting.
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Number fields collect numeric data, for example:
- Order amount
- Satisfaction level (0-5)
- Number of children
- Number of square meters
- Income
- Amount borrowed
The values sent for number fields:
- can be positive or negative
- when whole, have 32-bit (4-byte) precision (bounds: -2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647)
- when decimal, have 128-bit (16-byte) precision
When numeric or monetary data relates to an event, it is generally worth declaring your fields as statistic fields.
That way you easily find that data in your reports.
For example:
by declaring the Order amount as a statistic field, you tell Webmarketer to attribute a share of the revenue to the
marketing campaigns preceding the purchase.
Some field types, such as currency fields, get special treatment to normalize currencies.
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Date fields collect temporal information, for example:
- Date of birth
- Appointment date
- Purchase date
The values sent for date fields:
- must be sent in the "YYYY-MM-DD" format, to remove any culture-related ambiguity
- can be in the past (-2000 years) as well as in the future (+2000 years)
If a date is invalid and the field declared in the event type is optional, the event is still created, without the date. If the field is required, the event is not processed.
No worries, though: even when events are not processed, they are still ingested into a dedicated collection so they can be reprocessed.
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Boolean fields collect true/false information, for example:
- Existing customer?
- Are you a business?
The values sent for boolean fields:
- can be
trueorfalse
If a value is invalid and the field declared in the event type is optional, the event is still created, without the value. If the field is required, the event is not processed.
No worries, though: even when events are not processed, they are still ingested into a dedicated collection so they can be reprocessed.
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As its name suggests, the Email address field type collects your users' email addresses.
Selecting this field type lets you:
- filter out the events sent with an invalid email address.
- guarantee the quality of the emails collected (if you intend to use them for your marketing campaigns, say)
This can be useful when no validation or spam filtering rule is in place on your website, and helps keep the quality of the collected data high.
If an email address is invalid and the field declared in the event type is optional, the event is still created, without the email address provided. If the field is required, the event is not processed.
No worries, though: even when events are not processed, they are still ingested into a dedicated collection so they can be reprocessed.
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This field type collects your users' phone numbers.
It has one peculiarity, though: it accepts numbers in a national format. To learn more about how phone numbers are handled, see our Phone number handling page.
If a number is invalid and the field declared in the event type is optional, the event is still created, without the number provided. If the field is required, the event is not processed.
No worries, though: even when events are not processed, they are still ingested into a dedicated collection so they can be reprocessed.
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This field type collects your users' monetary information, for example:
- Taxable income
- Monthly rent
While such data could be stored in a number field, declaring it as currency lets you store the currency the amount is expressed in.
Since exchange rates move over time, Webmarketer lets you normalize every monetary value into your project's main currency, and therefore compare your users' monetary data easily and accurately.
For more information about normalizing ad spend, see the Currency handling page.
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This field type collects your users' geographic information, for example:
- Home
- Search area
This field type unlocks the geographic features of Webmarketer (enriching user location, building audiences, and so on).
Sending information for a location field requires sending several components:
- Street address
- City
- Postal code
- Country
As a general rule, it is best to keep those fields clearly separate in your forms and never to ask for a plain "Address". That way you build on precise, less ambiguous and more usable information.
Once those components are received, Webmarketer determines the precise geographic position (latitude/longitude) so it can be used in audiences and reports.
Beware: for cost and privacy reasons, geolocating the provided address stops at city level.
Note as well that when a location field is declared as PII, it gets partial anonymization logic that keeps the geographic information at city level.
Learn more about partial anonymization.