Things you need to know:

Insight data is made up of collections of structured data that you can store at either a contact or account level. Each piece of data within a collection is called an Insight data record. There is very little restriction on the type of data you can store in an Insight data collection; essentially, you can store anything that is serialisable to JSON.

In the same way that you can segment on contact data fields like gender, age, and geography, Insight data stored against your contacts allows you to segment on additional data sets like purchases, browsing behaviour or product reviews. The higher the quality of your Insight data, the better you can segment your contacts and personalise your communications.

Insight data also provides the power behind many of Dotdigital’s ecommerce features, and is a key component of the majority of our integrations.

Broadly, there are two types of Insight data that you can store in Dotdigital. We refer to these as contact-scoped or account-scoped.

This means Insight data stored against individual contact records, and relating to contact activity.

For example:

Contact-scoped Insight data can be viewed in two places:

This refers to Insight data stored at an account level; data that doesn’t relate to any specific contacts. The most common example of account-scoped Insight data is a product catalog.

To view your account-scoped Insight data collections and records, go to Connect > Account Insight data.

The Insight data tab displays all of your account-scoped Insight data collections. To view the records within a collection, select the collection name, then select an individual record from the left side panel.

For billing purposes, we classify Insight data as either non-billable or billable.

Non-billable Insight data collections are our standard Insight data collections. You don’t pay any additional charges for storing Insight data records of this type.

For standard collections, we provide a data schema for you to adhere to, to ensure that your data works seamlessly to power all the related features in Dotdigital.

Billable Insight data collections are custom Insight data collections, which allow you to store data in a schema that you define. These are charged per Insight data record. The cost per record is detailed in your Service Agreement.

If you're on our CXDP package, you don’t pay additional charges for custom Insight data.

✔️ Included in your package allowance | ➕ Available for an additional charge

There are a number of standard Insight data collections that you can store; these are collections with a naming convention and schema — or structure — defined by us. You can also store custom Insight data collections, where the name and schema is defined by you.

Our standard Insight data collections are the power behind our ecommerce features, so it’s important that you stick to our provided schema in these cases.

The standard Insight data collections you can use in your account are:

You can store anything that's serialisable to JSON in a custom Insight data collection. Insight data requires that data stored in a single collection is similarly structured. Each collection may have a different schema, allowing you to store a variety of different data against contacts.

Schemas are defined implicitly when you upload data for the first time, meaning any data you subsequently add to the collection must follow the same schema as the first data set you used to create the collection. Data schemas are extendable but not editable; you can add additional fields to a schema, but you can’t change the fields already defined.

CustomInsight is useful when there is a need to store structured information, especially when there may be duplicate sets of that information, as a contact can have an infinite number of Insight records.

For example, you could use a custom Insight data collection to store:

The Dotdigital interface can only display a maximum of 1000 records for a particular Insight data collection per contact.

For contacts with more than 1000 records in a single collection, data is still collected and available to use, but is not displayed in the platform interface.

There are a number of methods you can use to import Insight data into your account:

Once Insight data is stored against your contacts or account, you can:

These are just a few examples; Insight data allows a great deal of flexibility in the kinds of data you can store, so there is a wide range of things you can achieve with it.