Journeys Webhooks

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This feature is currently in Private Beta

This feature is not yet available to the general public. If you are interested in getting early access to Journeys Webhooks, please fill out this form, or reach out to [email protected].

With Journeys Webhooks you can create custom webhook nodes in your Journeys to send web requests to your servers (or anywhere on the internet) at just the right moment in your customer journey. You can configure everything about the web request, from the method and URL to custom headers and body content. Additionally, each request can be personalized using information about the user on whose behalf it has been triggered. Leveraging a webhook within your OneSignal Journey lets you create a powerful customer engagement funnel that coordinates seamlessly with the rest of your MarTech stack, freeing up the rest of your team to focus on your own application and providing the best experience possible.

Using Webhooks

Using webhooks comes in two parts once you have a journey set up:

First, configure a new webhook for your app under Settings → Webhook. Fill out all the web request information according to your server (or whatever service you are sending requests to), including the “http” method (usually a POST), the URL, any custom headers (authentication often goes here if necessary), and the body content.

Personalization

You can personalize all of the fields in your webhook using information about the user on whose behalf it was triggered. This gives you the flexibility to use webhooks for nearly any use case.
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You can include the External User ID as well as any tags on the user with liquid templating. This information is available via the user object which has the following structure:
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user: {
    external_user_id: 'example123456',
    tags: {
        key: value,
        ...
    }

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For example, if you want to include the external user ID in your webhook URL you could use:
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https://example.com/webhook/user/{{user.external_user_id}}
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Similarly, you can get the value of specific tags and include them in your content by accessing them directly in the tags object:
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external_user_id: {{user.external_user_id}}
name: {{user.tags.first_name}} {{user.tags.last_name}}
favorite_color: {{user.tags.favorite_color}

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Check out the Message Personalization for more details about how to use liquid templating in general.

Remember that each request represents one specific user; OneSignal will send a new copy of this request every time a user hits the correct node in your journey. Using the tag selector and the liquid templating language, you can customize the request payload with user information.

Setting a Webhook up in a OneSignal Journey

Once you have configured the webhook, you can test it with the 'Send Test Webhook' button and select a user. You will be able to see the request go through and the response from the server on the other side; iterate as necessary until your hook is perfect!

Next, open a journey and add a new 'webhook' node. Select your newly created webhook and that's it! Every time a user reaches the new webhook node OneSignal will make the request in your webhook configuration with that user information.

Results / Debugging

You can see how your webhook performs over a period of time on the webhook report page under the 'stats' tab. This will include all-time numbers, the current status of your webhook, and time series data showing what kind of responses the hook has been receiving. Any HTTP response in the 200 range indicates an event was successfully received, while responses in the 400s and 500s indicate errors. A timeout means the server on the other side didn't manage to respond within a reasonable amount of time so OneSignal closed the connection and assumed it failed.

You can see a sampling of recent requests under the 'logs' tab for even more detail. This will show actual requests and the responses from the other side (if applicable). If your webhook has issues, this is a great place to look first. If you need to change/update your webhook, you can edit it on the form page and send test requests to see the full details you need until you can get it right.

Retries / Disabling

When a webhook request fails for any reason (anything from connectivity issues to not being configured correctly to an error on the receiving server) OneSignal will retry sending the event again after a short delay. This will happen a few times with increasing delays between requests. If enough retries fail in a row, the hook will be marked as 'failed permanently' and will no longer be retried.

If too many separate requests fail in a row, this is probably because of an issue on the receiving end; the receiving end could have errors or have changed/disabled something. OneSignal will continue to send requests to a certain point, but if the requests continue to fail, the webhook might be disabled by OneSignal. If this happens, make sure to spend some time troubleshooting, fixing and then testing the webhook before re-enabling it.

Tips for Success:

1. You typically will want to have webhooks connect to your own servers, not third party services. While there is nothing wrong with connecting directly to a third party the following can be harder to manage:
   1. It will be more challenging to configure/debug
   2. Volume of requests will not be managed in OneSignal.
      1. Webhooks will be sent out as fast as users hit the nodes in your journey and this might overwhelm other services, hit rate limits, or run up YOUR bill unexpectedly. This is especially common when trying to use another messaging channel for something like SMS. The flexibility of webhooks means OneSignal does not know what you're trying to accomplish with them so you may want to create a simple service of your own that accepts the webhook requests then correctly handles your third party connection limits, rate limits, and queue.
2. Many services have public HTTP APIs which means you can connect to them with a webhook; look for their API docs and examples of how to make an HTTP request to find the right place to get started.