How to edit a custom Marketing Data field

[stevestormoen]

If you create a custom Marketing Data field in your Invoca account, you're able to define the information that's most important to your business and capture it. But if your business needs change or you integrate your Invoca account with other third party software, you may wish to change the configuration of your custom Marketing Data fields. 

To edit a custom Marketing data field, first follow these steps to select the field you’d like to to edit.
 

1. Log in to your Invoca account. 
2. In your sidebar menu, click Settings, then select Marketing Data in the Network section.
3. A list of all the Marketing Data fields in your account will appear in your Marketing Data Dictionary menu. Identify the custom Marketing Data field you wish to edit, then click the pencil icon for that Marketing Data field. You cannot edit standard Marketing Data fields in your Invoca account.

From here, you can edit the following attributes of a Marketing Data field:

Partner (API) Name: This is the technical parameter name for your Marketing Data field. Be very careful editing this field, as it must exactly match the data you are looking to capture on your website or send to another system via API. If you edit the Partner (API) Name of a Marketing Data field, you will lose all historical data that you have collected for this Marketing Data field. Additionally, you will also need to update Invoca tags that use that Marketing Data field to include its new Partner (API) Name, as well as any third-party systems that produce that data or receive it via API, and any integrations or webhooks that you use with this Marketing Data field will stop functioning. 

For these reasons, we highly recommend that you do not edit this field unless you no longer need nor collect information from this Marketing Data field.

Friendly Name: This is the name for your Marketing Data field that will appear in your Invoca reports. If you edit the Friendly Name of a Marketing Data field, the new name will automatically be shown in all of your Invoca reports.

Field Values: Used for offline marketing, this is a list of default values that you can define to choose from when applying Marketing Data attribution. After editing the field values for a Marketing Data field, we recommend you check any promo numbers you've applied values to for this Marketing Data field. If any of these promo numbers are associated with a field value you no longer wish to support, you should take this opportunity to change that field value.

Attribution Model: Used for online marketing, this is an option that allows you to choose how you want Invoca to collect and update your Marketing Data values if a customer visits more than one landing page before calling you. You can choose between the following attribution models:
 

• Unique: Used for Marketing Data fields that will be unique for each visitor. This can be a first party Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) or an Invoca-supplied ID. Your account should only contain one Marketing Data Field with the Unique attribution model.
• First Touch: Captures the first value of the given Marketing Data field for a customer. Useful for crediting display ads and other awareness assets, or capturing additional UUIDs from third parties such as Adobe or Google.
• Last Touch: Updates the value of your Marketing Data field to the most recent value. Useful for capturing the last page a customer viewed prior to calling.
• Multi: Stores up to five values of the same Marketing Data field for a customer. Useful for capturing a customer’s journey across your site, or the various products they may have viewed prior to calling. For more information on how multi-touch attribution selects data to use, see our article, What is the difference between each Marketing Data attribution model?

Default Data Mapping: If Invoca is unable to find values for any of the available Marketing Data Fields, you can assign it a default value instead in the Default Data Mapping drop-down menu. These default values can be chosen from a list of Invoca-supplied options, including basic caller, number, and page information. Additionally, Invoca allows for certain multi-mapped default values, which combine several fields together.

Enable Sharing: For Syndicated affiliate campaigns, you can share your Marketing Data field with other syndicating accounts by clicking the Enable Sharing checkbox. If your Invoca account is associated with affiliate marketing profiles, those accounts will be able to receive the data that you apply or capture for this Marketing Data field into their Invoca accounts. If you disable sharing, syndicated accounts will no longer be able to receive Marketing Data values from your account for this field.

When you have finished editing your Marketing Data field, click Save to save these changes.
 

Changing the data type of a Marketing Data field

Marketing Data fields can be created using three different data types: Categories, which you can use to pivot your information in reporting; short text strings, can also be used to pivot and are useful for individual parameters from URL slugs, cookies, or javascript data; and long text strings, which are used to capture the visitor’s full URL. Once a Marketing Dat field has been created, you cannot change its data type. Categories and short text strings support up to 255 characters, and long text strings support up to 10,000 characters.

Instead of changing the data type of a Marketing Data field, you have two options for capturing that same data using a different data type.
 

1. Create a new Marketing Data field with a different Partner (API) name and set up your other marketing technology to associate the data you wish to capture with the new Partner (API) name.
2. Delete your existing Marketing Data field and create a new field with the same Partner (API) name using the corrected data type. This option is not recommended, because deleting a Marketing Data field will delete all your previous phone call attribution data for that field. Additionally, Marketing Data from your previous phone calls will no longer appear in your reports.

What happens to my reporting, integrations, and webhooks after editing a Marketing Data field?

After editing a Marketing Data field, the following tips can help you troubleshoot any problems that might arise:
 

• Any Marketing Data values from your previous phone calls using that field will still be accessible in your Invoca reports and available in APIs.
• If you change the name of a Marketing Data field and wish to access that data via API, it will be accessible using the new name. This is true even for transaction information from before you renamed the Marketing Data field.
• If you change the name of a Marketing Data field, API integrations, webhooks, Signals or Campaign Call Treatments that reference this field all need to be updated.
  • If you don’t update your Webhooks, Signal expressions, or Call Treatment “check a condition expressions,” when these functions try to reference your old field name, they will not cause a critical error. However, they will always return a blank value while trying to reference your old Marketing Data field name. 
  • API integrations that are hard coded and expect that field to be present could break, depending on the 3rd party code; but in general if using best practices on the 3rd party side, it would just be null / undefined / blank until the integration was updated.

Related:
• How to create a custom Marketing Data field 
• How to apply the same Marketing Data value for all calls to a promo number 
• What is the difference between each Marketing Data attribution model?