What are visitors, events, emails, tags, segments, and ads?
Bento is very unique in how it handles it's visitor and event data so it's worth reading this article to get a big picture on how the system works in your mind.
Visitors
Visitors hold all the logic around who an individual is, whether or not they are subscribed, where they are from, and custom fields which allow you to describe more about who they are.
This data is modified either manually through our UI, via an import, or through events.
They also have many visits, events, emails, sessions (automations), ads, and tags which are detailed below.
Events
Events are essentially a log showing what a visitor has engaged with your application. Events have a name, some location data, and a payload filled with detailed information about the event (i.e cart information).
The payload can contain information that helps Bento identify who a person is, what fields we should add to their profile, and even what tag we should create. For the most part, this happens automatically through the libraries we provide.
If an event comes in from a visitor we haven't seen before and doesn't include an email we'll create a new anonymous visitor for that event.
Most importantly, events are used as the basis for starting an automation in Bento and can be filtered to ensure your automations start exactly how you would like them to.
Visits
When someone visits your website, Bento creates a visit with lots of useful information.
traffic source - referrer, referring domain, landing page location - country, region, city, latitude, longitude technology - browser, OS, device type utm parameters - source, medium, term, content, campaign
Functionally, this isn't used for much other than reporting.
Ads
When someone visits your website via a UTM generated link, Bento creates an ad which is then associated to that visitor. A visitor can have many ads.
Unlike our competitors, this means that you can search up visitors based on more than just one advertisement which is powerful for multi-touch attribution.
Emails
When you send an email via an automation or a broadcast to a visitor it is logged and searchable in Bento. An email contains information about who it was sent to, how it was rendered, and the broadcast/sequence/workflow it was associated to.
Tags
Tags are simple ways to describe who a visitor at a high level which can be used in segments or searches.
We recommend using tags for status descriptions of a visitor (like lead or customer) but not more detailed descriptions like a job role or preference.
Bento also supports unique tag groups which allow you to bundle tags into a group and ensure a visitor can only have one in the group at a time.
Segments
Segments are essentially saved searches based on any of the above criteria we have mentioned.
Segments update in real-time and don't require any additional work to add visitors to them.