Act-On tracks a wide range of contact behaviors such as form submissions, email engagement, website visits, and webinar attendance. Sometimes, though, you have additional data outside Act-On that would make your segmentation and reporting even more powerful.
Act-On’s Custom Data integration lets you bring that related data into Audience Center to supplement your contact data. This can include behavioral information (purchases, registrations, support cases, service claims) or extended profile information (owner tables, account attributes, distributor details, and more). You can upload a file manually or use the Custom Data API to sync this data into Act-On on an ongoing basis.
Custom Data is available for accounts that use Audience Center to manage contact data. It replaces the previous Custom Touch Points and Extension Lists features.
Quick Reference – Working with Custom Data
When to use Custom Data
- You have transactional or behavioral data (e.g., purchases, events, claims) that lives outside Act-On.
- You want to segment on extended attributes (e.g., account or distributor info) not stored directly on contact records.
- You are using Audience Center and Segmentation 2.0 for advanced segmentation.
Ways to bring data into Act-On
- Manual upload – One-off or periodic CSV uploads from the Custom Data tab in Audience Center.
- Custom Data API – Automated, recurring syncs from your external systems.
- Custom CRM Data – Extended CRM tables brought into Audience Center via a customized CRM sync.
Key requirements
- Each record must relate back to a contact via email address or an external ID stored in Audience Center.
- Use consistent datasets (e.g., a single Purchases dataset) if you want to count or aggregate records per contact.
- Uploaded custom data does not create contacts; import new contacts separately into Audience Center.
Custom Data Upload
Use a manual upload when you have periodic files to import (for example, a list of event attendees) and you do not need an automated integration.
- Go to Audience Center > Custom Data.
- On the Custom Data tab, click Upload Custom Data in the upper-right corner.
- Select or create the dataset where the file should be stored, then follow the prompts to upload and map your file.
Your file should contain:
- A contact email address OR an external ID that matches data in your Audience Center database.
- One or more columns of custom data you want to upload (for example, product, event name, channel, status).
- For behavior data, a date column is recommended so you can track when each activity occurred.
- If you plan to update or replace individual records, include a unique ID per record (for example, a purchase number or registration ID).
- Save your file as a .csv and ensure it is no larger than 1 GB.
- Remember that uploading Custom Data will not add contacts to your Audience Center database. If you have new contacts in the file, import them directly into Audience Center in addition to uploading the Custom Data.
When uploading, you can choose to create a new dataset or add to an existing dataset. Think of a dataset as a high-level category of related data.
- If you regularly upload purchase data, use a single “Purchases” dataset and add each new file to it. This makes it easier to build segments that count or filter by the number of purchases per contact.
- If you upload webinar data, include an event title and date in your file, and add each webinar to the same dataset. This gives you more flexibility later when segmenting by webinar or time period.
- Create a new dataset if you are uploading substantially different data with different columns (for example, a separate dataset for service claims vs. purchases).
Once the data is uploaded, it will be processed by our team and made available in the Custom Data page within 2 business days. After it is available, you can use Custom Data as part of your segmentation (requires Segmentation 2.0).
Custom Data via API
If you need to keep external systems in sync with Act-On automatically, you can use the Custom Data APIs to create, update, and maintain your datasets on a regular schedule.
- Ideal for integrating eCommerce, product, billing, or support systems.
- Reduces manual file handling and keeps segmentation-ready data up to date.
- Uses the same dataset concepts as manual upload (for example, Purchases, Events, Claims).
Custom CRM Data
If you want to segment on additional CRM data beyond the standard tables synced to Act-On, we can help customize your CRM sync to include extra tables or fields (for example, custom account data, owner lookups, or related objects).
- This option is designed for customers who already sync a CRM to Audience Center and want more CRM data available in segmentation.
- A customized sync configuration is required and will be implemented with assistance from our team.
- Segmentation 2.0 is required to take full advantage of the additional CRM data in your segments.
To explore Custom CRM Data options for your account, please contact Support.