Prerequisites:
-An Active Campaign account
-An offer created in Nanacast
Click for the video tutorial
On the Notifications/Custom Fields page of your offer:
- Enable the Activate Advanced Outgoing API option
- You will find 5 available External URL fields for use with the Nanacast Outgoing API. For the purposes of integration with Active Campaign, we will only need one External URL field.
- Below this, you will find settings to create an Active Campaign integration URL, which you will provide in one of the External URL fields above for the Outgoing API.
In order to generate a properly formatted Active Campaign integration URL, you will need to retrieve some information from your Active Campaign account.
In your Active Campaign account:
- First go to My Settings, and click on the API tab.
- Copy the API URL. In Nanacast, this will go in the Active Campaign URL field.
- Copy the API Key. In Nanacast, this will go in the Active Campaign API Key field.
Still in your active Campaign Account, click on Apps, then Event Tracking.
- Copy the Event Key. In Nanacast, this will go in the Active Campaign Event Key field.
- From the code sample below the Event Key, find the “actid” variable. The value that follows it is your Active Campaign account ID. Select and copy just the ID without quotations. In Nanacast, this will go in the Active Campaign Account ID field.
With all these fields completed, the Active Campaign integration URL field below will be populated with a properly formatted URL to supply in one of the above External URL fields for the Advanced Outgoing API. Copy the URL and paste it in one of the available External URL fields.
Click Save to complete the integration steps on the Nanacast side.
But you’re not done yet. There are a few things you need to do on the Active Campaign side to take full advantage of the integration.
Setting up Event tracking in Active Campaign:
Back in the Event Tracking page of the Apps section of your Active Campaign account, you will need to create some events below “Events available for segmenting”
In Active Campaign, at the top right corner, click on your account name, then click "My Settings." In the settings area, you'll find a 'Tracking' section in the lefthand navigation.
Click 'Tracking', then scroll down to the 'Event Tracking' section. Make sure event tracking is turned on.
The events you need to add are:
- add
- decline
- delete
- modify
- payment
- product
- reactivate
- suspend
To add an event, type the name of the event, and then click “Add event”.
Each of these events correspond to the subscriber events that are triggered by the Nanacast Outgoing API. You can find documentation on what these API events are here:
http://nanacast.com/docs/outgoing_api.html
(You can also find it from the main menu in Nanacast under API Integration >> Outgoing API.)
Once these events are created in the Event Tracking area of Active Campaign, and if you’ve correctly completed the Outgoing API integration for Active Campaign in Nanacast, then whenever one of the above subscriber events is triggered for a client record in your offer in Nanacast (add, decline, delete, modify, etc.) it will be automatically pushed into Active Campaign.
Automations
These events can be used in “Automations” in Active Campaign to whatever actions you define there in your Active Campaign automations.
When setting up Active Campaign automations, the Advanced API ID (i.e. the offer ID) is included in the event data. This can be used, for instance, in If/Else conditions to take different actions based on which offer sent the event to Active Campaign. In other words, the offer ID can be used in Automations to help segment actions by offer.
Automation example
This example is setting an If/Else condition for an Add event, to add a contact to a specific Active Campaign List based on the Nanacast offer ID:
- In your Active Campaign account, click the Automations tab.
- Click the "New Automation" button. Name your Automation.
- For the question "How will a contact enter your automation?", select "Event is recorded"
- Select 'add' as the event
- You can either segment the add event here (skip to step 7), or you can save the add event without further segmentation and add a new action to the automation later (see step 6).
- If you saved the add event without segmenting, Click the + button to add your first action. In the new action, select Conditions & Workflow > If/Else
- In the first column of the condition, select Site & Event Data > Event: add
- Set the second column of your condition to "Data Value is"
- Set the third column to offer ID (aka the "Advanced API ID") of one of your offers in Nanacast. If your offer ID were '10000100', that is what you would put here. Save.
- Add a new action. In the new action, select Contacts > Subscribe.
- Select the list you want to subscribe the contact to for the offer ID, and save.
- Add any further actions you want to the automation, and/or an action to end the automation.
The end-result of the above automation will be that adding a new subscriber to that offer ID in Nanacast will add the subscriber as a contact in Active Campaign, and add the contact to the selected list. (Assuming the contact is not already in your Active Campaign contacts, or in the list.)
Please consult Active Campaign support resources if you need additional assistance in setting up Active Campaign automations.
Troubleshooting
When troubleshooting any integration via the outgoing API, one helpful resource is our API logging tool. You can find this from the main menu under API Integration >> Outgoing API logging.
- The Offer Info column represents the name of the offer making the API call.
- The Outbound URL column represents the URL your API calls are hitting.
- The Data column represents the data being sent in the API call. Click on the column to see the full data output.
- The Server Response column represents any response provided by the receiving server. You may have to resize the grid to see this column, depending on the size of the outbound API URL. If the column appears blank, click on the column for an individual API call event to confirm whether there was a response.
Your server is not required to provide a response in order for the data to be successfully sent/received. In fact, a successful call will often result in no response in this column. This column is most helpful when receiving an error response.
In the case of Active Campaign integration, the server which the Nanacast API is contacting is a nanacast.com relay script used for Active Campaign integration-- That script is sending an API call to the Active Campaign URL, formatted for the Active Campaign API. However, our relay script is echoing the response from the Active Campaign server, so you will still see the Active Campaign server response in the Server Response column.