How dates work in Engageful

Learn how dates are stored in Engageful, what formats we accept, and how your device’s timezone influences which dates you see.

You can also send Engageful dates as custom user attributes. For example, you could track the date that a user subscribed to one of your products, or the date they cancelled their subscription.

Once you’re sending these date attributes to Engageful, you could use them in automated campaigns to engage users who cancelled a week ago, or send a tour to newly subscribed users to assist with their onboarding.

Tracking date attributes in Engageful

In order to let Engageful handle your custom user attribute as a date, make sure that your attribute ends with _at and is formatted as an epoch timestamp.

For example, subscription_created_at.

Engageful("init", {
    website: "YOUR_SITE_ID", // Important! Replace with your own ID.
    user: {
        id: "abc321", // Must be unique
        name: "John Doe",
        email: "[e-mail]",
        details: {
            subscription_created_at: 1339438758 // Send dates in unix timestamp format and end key names with "_at"
        },
    },
});

What is a Unix timestamp and why is it needed?

Date attributes should be sent to Engageful as a Unix timestamp. Every programming language has ways to calculate these timestamps.

Unix timestamps are always the preferred format for date attributes in Engageful, as they provide a specific point in time, so they can be translated across timezones.