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Receiving Behavioral Cohorts

Amplitude lets you group users who take similar actions into behavioral cohorts, such as those who downloaded a song in a music app or added an item to a cart. You can also define behavioral cohorts as customers that don’t take a specific action, like those who downloaded an app, but never finished signing up for a subscription.

Amplitude can sync these cohorts to other partner platforms through a series of REST API calls. Amplitude is able to create and update lists of cohort memberships (list-based) or set a user property or trait (property-based) in the Partner's platform.

Authentication

The REST API uses basic authentication. The partner must send across the api_key as username and an empty password

curl -u api_key https://[ INSERT URL ]
Setting traits/properties on user:
JSON_HEADERS = {
       'Content-Type': 'application/json',
  }
Auth: ($api_key, '')

Considerations

  • Amplitude uses bulk API, and batches multiple users in a single API request. By default, batches have 1000 users but the batch size is configurable.
  • You can schedule syncs to export as a one-time sync, or to export hourly or daily.
  • The first sync is a full sync of the entire cohort. Subsequent syncs include only the users who have moved in or out of the cohort's definition.
  • During the cohort sync, Amplitude sends a separate request for each cohort a user belongs to.
  • There aren't explicit rate limits. By default, Amplitude uses 4 threads to make requests to the downstream platform.
  • There's no limit to the number of cohorts you can create in Amplitude.
  • If a request fails, Amplitude retries eight times exponentially backing off starting with a one-second delay and ramping up to over two minutes for the last retry.

List-based cohort integration

A list-based cohort integration works best if a cohort is represented as a list of user identifiers in the target system. You must call a list creation API on the first sync. Make subsequent calls to the add API and remove API to keep the list membership up to date.

List creation

POST https://your.domain/lists
{
    'name': [Amplitude] {$cohort_name}: {$cohort_id},
    'context': {
        'integration': {
            'name': 'Amplitude Cohort Sync',
            'version': '1.0.0'
        }
    }
}

Add users to a list

POST https://your.domain/lists/$listId/add
{
    'userIds':[$userId, $userId, ...]
    'context': {
        'integration': {
            'name': 'Amplitude Cohort Sync',
            'version': '1.0.0'
        }
    }  
}

Remove users from a list

POST https://your.domain/lists/$listId/remove
{
    'userIds':[$userId, $userId, ...]
    'context': {
        'integration': {
            'name': 'Amplitude Cohort Sync',
            'version': '1.0.0'
        }
    }  
}

Property-based cohort integration

A property-based cohort integration works best with systems that represent cohort membership as a custom user property, such as a boolean flag or a tag. When cohort membership changes, Amplitude invokes the updateAPI to update the user property. Although you don't need list creation API here, some manual setup may be required to create the custom user property.

Single update

POST https://your.domain/lists/$listId/remove
{
    'type': 'identify',
    'traits': {
        '[Amplitude] {$cohort_name}: {$cohort_id}': True / False
    },
    'userId': ‘$user_id’,
    'context': {
        'integration': {
            'name': 'Amplitude Cohort Sync',
            'version': '1.0.0'
        }
    }
}

Batch update

POST https://your.domain/lists/$listId/remove
{
    'batch': [{
        'type': 'identify',
        'traits': {
            '[Amplitude] {$cohort_name}: {$cohort_id}': True / False
        },
        'userId': ‘$user_id',
        'context': {
            'integration': {
                'name': 'Amplitude Cohort Sync',
                'version': '1.0.0'
            }
        }
    }, {
        'type': 'identify',
        'traits': {
            '[Amplitude] {$cohort_name : {$cohort_id}': True / False
        },
        'userId': ‘$user_id’,
        'context': {
            'integration': {
                'name': 'Amplitude Cohort Sync',
                'version': '1.0.0'
            }
        }
    }]
}

Responses:

  • 200: Success
  • 400: Invalid request
  • 401: Unauthorized (bad api_key)
  • 404: Invalid User ID
  • 429: Throttling/rate limiting

The property Amplitude passes over for cohort members is set to true when a user becomes part of the cohort and it's set to false when a user leaves the cohort.

Testing

To test, Amplitude recommends creating a mock payload that you would expect to receive from Amplitude. For cohort integrations, the typical payload structure is as follows:

curl --location --request POST 'https://app.staging-01.TEST_COMPANY_NAME.com/api/v1/integration/amplitude/cohort \
--header 'api_key: TEST_API_KEY' \
--header 'app_id: TEST_APP_ID' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '
{
  "traits": {
    "cohort name:123": true
  },
  "type": "identify",
  "userId": "test.user@email.com"
}
'
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