Inbound Webhooks

The primary use case for Inbound Webhooks is Reverse ETL, as covered with our Census and Hightouch docs.

First, if you’re unfamiliar with Reverse ETL, it’s a category of tools that help you take data out of your Warehouse and send it to various SaaS platforms. It’s been a big request for us because customers want to mix their event data with warehouse data to get a more complete picture of their customers. The two most well-known reverse ETL tools are Hightouch and Census, and we support both, along with a host of others. 

To make things even better, our reverse ETL support is built on top of a pretty flexible Webhook connector, so you could use it to send us data from anywhere, including your codebase.

But let’s get started with the Reverse ETL use case. Let’s say you want to enrich the Accounts in Variance with data about usage volume or total revenue from an account. Currently, all that data is sitting in a database or Warehouse. Once you have connected that data to Hightouch or Census, the process is pretty simple to enrich all your accounts in Variance.

You’ll create a new Inbound Webhook (you’ll find this on your integrations page) and make a new connection. This will give you a URL and authorization header and some options about whether you want to do an Upsert (update and if the record is not there insert) or just an Update. Here’s an example that we use:

It’s an update only, meaning new accounts will not be created, and it sends the total event volume for each customer so that we can include that data in views. We give you granular control to correctly map your accounts and contacts to your data in Variance. (In this case, we’re mapping using the Subdomain field.)

One neat thing about the way we handle this data is we convert it back into events so that it works with the rest of our infrastructure. This means you can use this data in Milestones and Streams just let everything else.

Beyond updating Account and Contact properties, though, you can actually push events into Variance via Reverse ETL at either the contact or the account level. You can set this up the same way, but when you set up an event, you’ll have some additional mapping options.