Create and track custom data attributes (CDAs) about your users and leads, based on criteria that’s specific to your business. You can use this data to filter and create customer segments, and to send targeted messages and campaigns. You can also use it as qualification data to qualify leads and trial users

What’s a custom data attribute?

A custom data attribute (CDA) tracks facts about your customers — like the plan someone is on, or when they signed up — as opposed to an event, which tracks recurring customer actions. 

Here’s an example: If your product is a project management tool, you could track data about the number of files each user has. Then, if you want to message users who haven’t started adding files to the tool and might need some help onboarding, you could set up a message targeted to users with "files less than 1".

The most common CDAs set up on Intercom are about customer development, such as:

Create custom data attributes

To create a new attribute in Intercom, go to Settings > Data > People and click + Create attribute. Give your new attribute a name, a description, select the type of data it will store.

Prevent attribute updates via the Messenger

If "Attribute Updates" is enabled, then updates to this attribute will only be accepted if they come from an authenticated request (via REST API or JSON web token on Messenger). Unauthenticated requests will be ignored.

This setting can be toggled on or off for each attribute and it does not affect updates from other sources like our Public API, CSV Imports, etc. All attributes that don't have this enabled will be open to insecure updates.

Click save and the attribute will be added to your attributes list. It won't be populated for any of your customers yet, you'll need to send it to Intercom via the JavaScript snippet, the API, or an app from our app store. 👌

If you need to change the format or description of the attribute you just created, you can edit it and make the change:

Update custom attributes via the Messenger

Custom data attributes can be updated using the Messenger Javascript code snippet.

When updating custom attributes via the messenger, double check that your keys always have a JSON-valid value that is a string (text), number, or boolean (true or false). That means using double quotes around text strings and sending NULL to cater for cases when no value exists for a user. 

You can also send us dates or URLs. You can track URLs as a text string, e.g. "http://www.google.com". Intercom will recognize this and automatically turn it into a hyperlink. Track dates by sending us a unix timestamp in seconds. If you create a key name that ends with “_at” we'll automatically treat it as a date rather than a number (see  "last_order_at"  below). Find out how dates work in Intercom here.

Here are some examples of data attribute key and value pairs:

Different types of CDAs you can send to Intercom

Things to remember:

Once you’ve updated your code snippet and started tracking the data, you should: 

Other methods

What is custom qualification data?

Qualification data is a special set of attributes you can manually update in your customer profiles as you qualify them. You can set these up via a simple form in Intercom. If you intend to update this data manually, you don’t need to do anything else. 

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.

Scroll down and click Add data then + Create new data from the dropdown menu. 

Here you can create a name (that’s your key) and choose a format for the values you’ll collect (Text, Number, True or False, or List).

If you choose the List format, this not an array structure but rather a list of selections where values are predetermined.

Finally, you can add a description to help your teammates understand the data.

Choose simple names for your custom qualification data. If you decide you want to qualify this data via the Messenger, customers will see these names in the Messenger.

Archive data attributes

Custom data attributes cannot be fully deleted, but you can archive them. Archived data won’t appear as a filter in your user or lead lists, so it’s a good way to clean up data you don’t need.
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Go to Settings > Data > People.
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Choose a piece of data you'd like to archive. Click the edit icon next to it and then click Archive in the pop-up box. You can unarchive them if you change your mind, but you can’t completely delete custom data attributes.

To find your archived custom attributes, just scroll to the bottom of the page.

If you want to unarchive your custom attribute, open the attribute and click "Unarchive".

Understanding CDA limits and best practices

Custom data attributes (CDAs) have workspace limits to maintain optimal performance.

There’s a limit of 250 People and Company CDAs per workspace, but you can archive unused attributes to free up space.

When creating new attributes, consider these best practices:

Regularly review your CDA usage to ensure efficient workspace management. If you need increased capacity after implementing optimization strategies, additional limit increases may be available upon request.

FAQs