Webhooks

Webhooks are customizable triggers that send your Fullstory event data to other systems in near real-time. Use webhooks to:

• Push customized event data to a CDP, messaging app, or AI model.
• Get timely notifications of sentiment signals based on key user actions or characteristics. 
• Unlock new revenue by alerting teams when high-value customers signal interest. 

This article reviews:

• An introduction to webhooks.
• Setting up behavioral webhooks.
• Setting up system interaction webhooks. 

If you are a developer looking for detailed technical documentation on webhooks, see our Webhooks Developer Guide.

An introduction to webhooks

Like REST APIs, webhooks send information from one application to another. Companies use webhooks to do all sorts of things you are used to encountering in your digital life. For instance, webhooks were probably involved in sending that SMS message you recently received from your bank.

Unlike REST APIs which pull data from the source to the destination system, webhooks push data from the source to the destination system. This method has several benefits:

• Webhooks are event-driven. They trigger precisely when a predefined event occurs in the source system instead of whenever the REST API polls for data. This helps make sure your data is available precisely when you need it. For example, you can immediately update your marketing segmentation when a user performs a high-interest behavior.
• Webhooks are efficient. They push data to your destination as soon as it becomes available, while REST APIs try to pull new data, even if there’s nothing to pull! Research from Zapier suggests that APIs often waste up to 98.5% of their polls looking for data that doesn’t exist. Webhooks eliminate this operational inefficiency.
• Webhooks are flexible, allowing you to incorporate behavioral data into many different operational workflows. We’re excited to learn how you use them! To share a use case or request a new webhook that we don’t currently offer, send us a note here.

Setting up behavioral webhooks

Behavioral webhooks let you build personalized workflows that trigger when users perform specific events. Examples include sending alerts for potentially fraudulent behavior or providing immediate technical support outreach when a customer has a frustrating experience. You can build these behavioral webhooks in the Fullstory UI without client-side logic.

Install webhooks

First, install webhooks to begin using them in your Fullstory account.

1. Go to Settings > Integrations > Destinations. 
2. Click Install next to Webhooks. 

Create a stream

Then, create a stream to define the events that trigger your webhook, the data sent, and how the destination system should respond.

1. Go to Settings > Integrations > Destinations.
2. Click Manage next to Webhooks.
3. Click Add Stream.
4. Give your stream a name and a description.
5. Configure one or more events to trigger your webhook, then click Next.
6. Add your webhook URL, the destination for your data.
7. If required, add a secret or webhook key.
8. Test the connection, then Save.

Important notes:

• The name of your stream will be injected as the event name in the webhook payload. 
• You can trigger webhooks from any user-defined event. Create new events or see what exists in your account today under  Data Management > Events > Filter by “user defined.” 
• Use the ‘or’ button if different events should trigger the same webhook. For example, you could trigger a “Checkout Friction” webhook if a user has slow load times on cart pages, rage clicks on a purchase button, or error messages displayed on checkout. Using ‘or’ logic, Fullstory will emit the webhook if any of those events occur within the user’s session. 
• Unless you are hosting your own endpoint, most destination systems will ask you to create a dedicated webhook URL to capture a stream of events. Perform this step in the destination system first, then copy/paste the unique URL into the Fullstory UI. If the third-party system requires authentication, download a secret key from that system and copy/paste it directly into the Fullstory UI.
• Testing the connection fires a sample webhook payload to the URL to confirm a 200 response code.

FAQs

How many webhook streams can I have at the same time? 
Fullstory currently supports up to 10 consecutive streams. You can send all streams to the same endpoint or 10 different endpoints.

What if a user matches a stream definition multiple times in the same session? 
Fullstory behavioral webhooks are scoped at the session level, meaning that we evaluate each stream definition once per user session. Even if we find multiple occurrences of the same stream definition within the session, we will only emit one webhook for the first match we observe.

As an example, if you define a “Checkout” event as “Visited the checkout confirmation URL” and a user visits this URL 5 times within the same session, Fullstory will emit only one webhook event called “Checkout.”  

Can I create webhooks for API-defined events or other signals in Fullstory?
Yes, as of July 2024, you can use any combination of Defined, Custom and Native events to define your webhook signal.

Setting up system interaction webhooks

System interaction webhooks allow you to notify destination systems about changes to your day-to-day Fullstory operations. This includes:

• New Segments: Receive a webhook notification whenever a team member creates a new segment within Fullstory.
• New Notes: Notes in Fullstory help teams work together to identify and fix digital experience issues. Now, you can easily send your Fullstory notes to other platforms, such as Jira, by firing a webhook event when a note is created in Fullstory.
• Segment Threshold Alerts: With an Advanced or Enterprise plan, you can also set up segment threshold alerts and pair them with webhooks to implement custom workflows. For instance, fire a webhook event to page an engineer in PagerDuty when a segment capturing dead clicks exceeds a defined threshold.

Create system interaction webhooks under Settings > Integrations > Webhooks. All you need is the URL for the endpoint where Fullstory should send the data and your shared secret used for authentication.

Check out our Webhooks Developer Guide to learn more about setting up webhooks and explore all the additional technical details.