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Getting started with incoming integrations

What is a data-in integration?

A data-in integration is a website, mobile app, database, or service that you want to capture data from—it’s a “source” of data! These integrations help you collect data from your various customer touchpoints so you can route it to Customer.io and other outgoing integrations, so you can maintain an unbroken chain of customer data throughout your stack.

You’ll add a different data-in integrations for each website or app you want to collect data from. Each integration has an API Key, which lets you send data to Customer.io.

How many incoming integrations should I have?

You should create a different “integration” for each application that you want to collect data from. For example, your website and your mobile app are different integrations; they might represent the same services, but are separate applications.

Having a different integration per app:

• Makes your implementation flexible: granular integrations help you control the specific data that you want to send to different destinations. If you use one API key for all your data, it’ll be harder to filter the data you send out of Customer.io!
• Helps you debug integrations: different API keys per integration makes it easy to see when and where problems occur.

Types of data-in integrations

We organized our incoming into categories to help you find the right integrations. We’ll add new integrations periodically, but they’ll typically fall into these categories:

• Website: You can install our JavaScript library to capture information about people, events, and so on.
• Mobile: Use our mobile SDKs to capture information about people, events, and so on.
• Server: Server-side integrations let you send data directly from your servers.
• Data Warehouse: Use your data warehouse as a source of data for Customer.io. You might do this if you collect data in a single place before you send it to Customer.io.
• Database: Use your database as a source of data.
• CRM 🎉New : Activate your Salesforce data in Customer.io and send it to other downstream integrations!

Your workspace is also a data-in integration!

Customer.io generates metrics from the messages you send, the messages people open, and so on. You can send this data out to various integrations as well.

This makes Customer.io its own “data-in” integration! When you set up a Data Out integration, you can click Add Source and select your workspace as a source of data to send events reflecting the messages you send out of Customer.io