Setting up a clear data structure is the first step toward a successful setup in Positive User. By organizing your contacts, events, and attributes early on, your team ensures that every piece of information is ready for large-scale campaigns and personalized interactions. Before you begin, we recommend using our “Data Structure & Automation Planning Spreadsheet” to map out your requirements.
Your data model is the foundation of your workspace. Follow these steps to build a structure that grows with your business.
Before touching any settings, identify what your team actually wants to achieve. Data should never exist "just because" - it needs to serve a purpose. Focus on the specific processes you want to automate, such as recovering abandoned carts or welcoming a new contact.
Data quality determines the success of your automations. It is much easier to start with a clean, smaller set of data that drives specific goals than to manage a massive database of unused attributes.
Define the most important processes you want to automate (top priority).
Aim for immediate results like a newsletter with dynamic personalization.
Identify which metrics you need to measure, such as open rates, conversion, or churn. (KPIs)
Objects organize the logic of your workspace. Decide which entities represent your business model. For most setups, your central point is the contact, where you track all interactions. If you work with businesses, you will also need the companies to link multiple contacts to one business. In e-commerce, you will use orders and products to manage sales and recommendations.
Answer the following questions:
What objects are necessary for implementation of your business processes?
Do you work with B2C or B2B segment?
What teams are going to work in the application? (marketing, sales, support, etc)
What additional elements of data might be useful? (info about subscription, tickets for support, etc)
Define clear scope and purpose for each object and describe them in a separate “Data Struture” file.
For every object, establish a set of attributes, like a contact’s name, email, or account status. These are the characteristics of your objects - fields where you can store information about them. Decide which fields are required and make sure your naming is consistent.
Learn more about attributes and their types from “What Is an Attribute” article.
Choose the right type. Avoid making everything a "string" (text). Use "numbers" for currency, "dates" for registration, and "booleans" (true/false) for status flags.
Use consistent naming conventions like “Last purchase date” instead of mixing different styles.
Add description to each attribute to make sure the purpose of every field is clear to every team member.
Define which fields are obligatory and which ones are not.
Create custom attributes in the application following the “How to Create a Custom Attribute” instruction.
Events are specific actions a contact takes, like logging in or abandoning a cart, which trigger your automations. Ecommerce processes also include product events - interactions of the contacts with specific products on your website.
For each event, define the details you need to capture - event attributes. For example, newsletter form submission should include the info about marketing consent.
In case of product events, you need no additional attributes - these events are connected to products, so you should choose from the product attributes, which data you want to send along with the events like purchase or order.
Later on you can use all these details to trigger your automations, build segments and use personalization in the campaigns. [LINK]
Events play a big part int he automations configuration - make sure you track all the main actions of the contacts on your website. Don’t forget about event attributes - they allow you to build deeper segmentation.
Key aspects:
Define the events and their attributes in the workspace before you start sending them to Positive User.
Avoid creating events with no purpose.
Add precise descriptions when exactly each event should be sent and what attributes it should include.
Decide how your objects connect, such as one contact having multiple events or deals assigned.
How to describe it:
Decide on the main keys that allow you to connect the objects. (E.g., “contact ID”, “company ID”).
Define the relations type (1:1 / 1:multiple).
Set how you manage the case when the data is not complete.
You must decide what happens when the same attribute or relationship is sent to Positive User multiple times from different sources.
Update Logic: Determine if new data should overwrite the old value, be aggregated, or only be added if the field is currently empty.
Identify Sources: Map out where your data comes from the website forms, e-commerce stores, CRM, ERP systems, support tickets, API integrations, webhooks, CSV imports, or Google Tag Manager.
Consistency Questions: Does the data flow in real-time or in batches (e.g., once a day)? How do you ensure data stays identical across different systems? Do you have error logs to handle failed imports?
Best Practice: Create a data flow map from your source to the marketing automation system and validate data before it is imported.
Plan how data will be delivered to your workspace - whether through API, JavaScript (on the site), Google Tag Manager, CSV imports, or webhooks.
Build a Source Map: Map your Data Source → Marketing Automation System → Data Structure.
Set Clear Rules: Without them, your team risks losing historical data or creating duplicate contacts.
The quality of your data decides the effectiveness of your automations.
Validation: Ensure emails meet the correct format and that numerical fields don't contain text characters.
Deduplication: Establish how to recognize duplicates (e.g., by email or a specific ID [LINK]) and set rules for merging records so your team doesn't have multiple profiles for the same contact.
Cleaning data: Set up the data audit rules and frequency. This will result in better quality of your marketing campaigns. (Check “How to Clean Your Contact List”)
Use the internal tools in Positive User to group your contacts: tags, contact lists and segments.
To know more about each option purpose, check our article “Comparing Tags, Segments and Contact Lists”.
You can define the most important ones in the beginning and develop the system along with the application usage intensity.
Use tags, lists and segments for statistics in your dashboards. [LINK]
Before your team launches major automations, verify that the data is arriving correctly.
Testing: Send a test event and check the contact's profile. Change an attribute and see if the corresponding workflow triggers as expected.
Auditing: Once a month, check your data consistency. Monitor the percentage of duplicates and look for missing values in your critical attributes.
