Reporting on AutoResponders via API

[DustinR637]

Is any AutoResopnder data available through the API? For example, when I request the Email Campaign Collection (/v2/emailmarketing/campaigns) for a client, it does not return any AutoResponders, but only standard campaigns. Without AutoResponders showing up in that list, I don't see how to get the CampaignId for an AutoResopnder, and the CampaignId seems to be the key for all other AutoResopnder data.

I saw in another thread that some more AutoResponder data will be available in v3 of the API. Will that be out soon?

[Marissa_R]

If you use an API or are thinking about it, one thing to keep in mind is the sending out of the Autoresponder Series and the Welcome Emails to new contacts.  The good news is that when you are setting up your API, Constant Contact gives you the option to choose if contacts are being added by the actual contact or by the site owner (that’s you).

Per this post in our Developer Forums by our Elijah_G:

“In order to specify this, you must add the action_by query parameter with the value ACTION_BY_VISITOR to your POST request to create the contact. You can find the details on this parameter as well as additional information about creating a contact here.

This ACTION_BY_VISITOR is only available for adding individual contacts via the API.

Bottom line: If you’re using an API, make sure to set the above up when setting up your API, otherwise your newly added contacts won’t be receiving your valuable emails that you have already created for them! And if you have any API questions, check out our Developer Forums!

[David_B.]

Hello,

Thank you for reaching out to the API Support team here at Constant Contact. Autoresponder features are one of our most requested additions to our API.

As of this moment there is no Autoresponder data available to our current V2 API. Our team is hard at work on our new V3 version of our API. and we hope to release contacts features here pretty soon. Unfortunately email campaign features probably won't be available with V3 until late 2017 or early 2018. I can't give a guarantee on that timeframe, however it is likely going to be several months before V3 email campaign functionality is available.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Sincerely,

David B.

API Support Specialist

[SashaF8]

Hello,

Reporting on AutoResponders via API still appears to not be available.  Please confirm.

Sasha

[David_B.]

Hello Sasha,

That is correct. Our team is focusing resources on building our V3 API. There are no plans at this time to add this functionality to our V2 API.

Regards,
David B.
Tier II API Support Engineer

[SashaF8]

Thank you David.  Very helpful to know. I'll adjust my plans accordingly. 

[SaroK5]

Hello David,
It is April of 2018 and api V3 is not out yet.
I'm on a big project, should I wait for the V3 to come out or do the project in reliable v2?
Thanks

[Jimmy_D]

Hello @SaroK5,

Our v3 is in closed beta testing at this point; however we do not have an ETA on general release. Also please note that v3 will be initially releasing with contacts endpoints only.

If your project needs to include sections other than contacts I would suggest to start with v2.

[GregB3955]

I cannot begin to tell you how utterly disheartening it is to learn this. My business partner and I spent the last two weeks working on something that added contacts to a list and then pulls their stats via the API. Are you saying it is impossible for us to do that?

I almost can't believe it though - Isn't this literally the two core things you'd want to do using an email marketing platform's API? Its just seems like a major lack of basic functionality...?

There is no way to add a contact to a campaign directly, correct? We have to add them to a list? But then once we add them to a list, there is no way to get any data back about their engagement? It just seems completely broken.

I'm hoping that we're missing something here (apologies if so).

What is the current status of being able to do this with the V3 API? We're using Ruby, so we'll have to spend another good chunk of time developing our own Ruby code to use it (the ruby gem uses V2) - but regardless - is this generally possible yet with V3?

[Jimmy_D]

Hi @GregB3955,

The v3 API is released with the contacts endpoints; we are releasing the v3 API in stages.

You do need to add a contact to a list first. Then you can schedule a campaign to send to that list.

With our v2 API you are able to get reporting information at the contact level and at the campaign level.

That reporting will be available with the v3 API; however as I mentioned we are releasing the v3 API in stages and those endpoints are not yet released.

[GregB3955]

Hey, thanks for the reply - but I'm still not quite getting the answer I'm looking for. Just trying to clarify here:

"You do need to add a contact to a list first. Then you can schedule a campaign to send to that list."

- So we add a contact to a list via the API. Then - are you saying we can schedule a campaign to send to that list through the API, and then get clicks/opens that way?

[Jimmy_D]

Hi @GregB3955,

Autoresponders are not available in the API. This means you cannot create them, schedule them, or view them in the API. You would need to log in to the website UI in order to do any of these actions. However; once you have your Autoresponder created and scheduled you do not need to modify it anymore after that. Once it is scheduled it stays in that status and all you need to do is to add contacts to the list that you attached to the contact.

The adding of contacts to a list can be done via the API.

[GregB3955]

OK. Got it.

So with the API, is there any possible way (we don't really mind how) to take an email address, send an email to that address, and then monitor results? Maybe I'm missing something.

[GregB3955]

Just want to make sure I'm not missing something here. So AutoResponders is your name for automatically adding customers from a list to a campaign, correct? And there is no API support for those.

Which is fine - we don't necessarily need that extra step of adding to a list first, then having that add them to the campaign through an autoresponder - as long as we can add a user to the campaign directly. I can't seem to find this either though. Otherwise, how would you expect people to complete the basic loop of 1) Send email -> 2) Track results through the API?

Again, apologies if I'm missing something or not understanding this properly. I just wanted to make 100% sure that this isn't currently possible because it seems like that would be the most basic/core functionality that an API for an email marketing platform would have.

[AnalyticsEdge]

This is what I have been doing:

- using the web interface, create a new list for the autoresponder, and set up the autoresponder to send to anyone added to the list.

- using the API, add new users to the list with the ACTION_BY_VISITOR option. That causes the addition of the email to trigger the autoresponder.

- using the API, query the contacts and filter to a short list by the list_id that is used for the autoresponder.

- for recently added contacts in that list, query get-activities for each contact through the API. You will get the send, open, and click activities for all of the autoresponder emails even though those 'campaigns' are not otherwise available. Figure out which campaign_id belongs to which email in the series and build yourself a lookup table.

- you can now report sends, opens, and clicks for each email in the autoresponder series.

It is a lot of queries and manipulation to get the results, but it is better than nothing...

[GregB3955]

Sounds super straight forward! .....

[Jimmy_D]

Hi @GregB3955,

I want to mention that an Autoresponder is a specific type of email campaign that is designed to automatically send out when a contact is added to a list. This is different than our normal email campaigns. That might have been a small bit of confusion.

There are reporting options for our normal email campaigns available from the API. However; for reporting information from an Autoresponder campaign @AnalyticsEdge did an amazing job of describing how to pull that data from the contacts reporting.

[GregB3955]

Hey @Jimmy_D,

Understood. Is there a way to send an email to someone without using an autoresponder so we can track results from it? Can we add an email to a campaign directly?

- Greg

[Jimmy_D]

Hi @GregB3955,

When sending out a standard email campaign it does have to be sent a contact list. The contact list then has your email addresses in it. The only way to send an email campaign to a single email address is with an option called QuickSend and that option is only available in our website UI.

[GregB3955]

So again - just looking for a verbal admission/confirmation here that your API has no way (out of the box / without some crazy workaround) to add contacts to a campaign, send it, and track results.

Can you confirm this?

[AnalyticsEdge]

The v2 API has the capability to add emails to a list:

https://v2.developer.constantcontact.com/docs/contacts-api/contacts-collection.html?method=POST

create a campaign:

https://v2.developer.constantcontact.com/docs/email-campaigns/email-campaigns-collection.html?method...

schedule the campaign:

https://v2.developer.constantcontact.com/docs/campaign-scheduling/campaign-schedule-collection.html?...

and report on the results:

https://v2.developer.constantcontact.com/docs/campaign-tracking/summary-report.html

...so you could do it all from the API.