Tracking user data in Intercom

You can group your users together based on who they are and what they do in your product. We store three types of data about your users:

Standard data attributes (a default set of data we already have about your users).
Custom data attributes (data you send us about your users). Note: You can also use custom user attributes as qualification data.
Events (data that records specific actions users take in your app).

Below, we’ll explain how these data types work and how you can make the most of them.

Standard data attributes

As soon as you install Intercom you’ll see the following list of standard user attributes on the left-hand side of your screen:

Name (a person’s full name).
Email (user’s or lead’s email address).
Phone number (lead's phone number).
Web sessions (the number of times a user has visited your site or app).
Last seen (the last day a user visited your site or app).
First seen (the first day a user visited your site or app).
Signed up (the day a user first signed up for your product).
City and country (calculated by the user’s IP address location).
Last contacted (the date you or a teammate last contacted a user).
Last heard from (the last day a user contacted you via message or email).
Last opened email (the date your user most recently opened an email).
Last clicked on link in email (the date your user most recently clicked on a link in an email).
Twitter followers (the number of Twitter followers a user has).
Unsubscribed from emails (when a user unsubscribes from an email from your team).
Tag (a group a person belongs to, based on a tag you’ve manually applied to them).
OS (the operating system a person is using).
Browser language (the language set by the browser a person is using).
Browser version (the precise version of the browser a person is using).
Language override (a preferred language setting for a person).

Pro tip: Standard data attributes are case sensitive, for the exact syntax you should use when sending this data into Intercom, check out our developer hub.

Important: If you've installed Intercom on your mobile app, you'll also see standard user attributes like: 'Last seen on iOS/Android', 'iOS/Android sessions' and 'iOS/Android device', etc.

Filtering standard user attributes

Now, armed with this data you can quickly filter your user base to answer questions, such as:

Who signed up in the last week?
Who signed up once but never returned?
What users on the free plan are yet to upgrade?
How many users have more than 1000 Twitter followers?
Who was using regularly up until a month ago, and then quit?

You can combine as many complex filters as you like and send targeted ongoing messages based on these filters. For example, if you want to encourage new users to upload their first song, you could send a message to users who ‘Signed up less than 30 days ago.’

Note: Standard data attributes automatically get updated. For example if a new user signs up, or logs in today that will get updated automatically in the list.

Send custom data attributes to Intercom

Intercom lets you send custom attributes about your users and these will all show in your user list too. Custom data attributes are information you send us about your users, like how many times they've purchased an item from your store, how many projects they have, or what plan they're on. For example, if you have a music sharing app, you could send us over the number of songs a user has played, or how many followers they have.

Note:

You can send us over whatever attributes you want to better understand your customers, and it will all show in Intercom. You’ll find lots more examples here.
You can create custom attributes about your users and/or about the companies they belong to.
You cannot create custom attributes with the same name as a standard attribute.

Filtering custom data attributes

You can apply filters based on custom data attributes, the same way you would with standard data attributes.

Once you’ve applied your filters, you can send these users and visitors targeted ongoing messages.

Note: Intercom allows string-based operators for strings, numerical operators for numerical values, and simple true/false filters for booleans values.

Using custom attributes to qualify your users

Qualification data is a special set of attributes you can update in your customer profiles as you qualify them. You can choose from existing custom data (both user and company data) you’ve already set up in Intercom, or you can create your own qualification attributes.

Once you've set this up, you can get our bot, Operator to automatically qualify your leads for you, and your teammates can manually add qualification data to your lead and customer profile as they qualify them.

Note: If you want to track this data via a ping, you need to add the key/value pairs to your intercomSettings code snippet, just as you would with other custom data.

Ready to get going with custom user attributes?

You can learn how to send custom attributes to Intercom, create descriptions for them, archive them and more here.

Events

You can send events to Intercom, to record whenever users take specific actions in your product. Events record the first and last time a user does something and the total amount of times they do something. For example, you can see the first time users clicked on a particular page, or when they most recently purchased an item.

Events will show in your user list, and you can filter them to answer questions like:

Are users visiting the same product page a lot recently?
Have they used the export feature a bunch of times? or
Have they downgraded their plan?

Ready to get going with events?

You can learn how to send events to Intercom, along with metadata about those events here.

Export your user data

You can quickly and easily export your user data out of Intercom. Here's how to do that.

Direct user profile links

With the user_id or email address of your user you can link directly to their user profile in Intercom using the following URLs:

https://app.intercom.com/apps/YOUR_APP_ID/users/show?user_id=THE_USER_ID

https://app.intercom.com/apps/YOUR_APP_ID/users/show?email=THE_USER_EMAIL

Note: The second URL above will only work for unique email addresses - these are email addresses that exist once in your user list.

What’s next?

Now that you know how to track user data in Intercom, it’s time to segment important groups of users into specific groups so you can send them targeted auto messages.