With Albacross, you can now automatically export your leads via our new Webhooks Workflow and connect it to your tools or your own platform. You might have heard about webhooks before but what does it actually mean?
There are two ways that applications can 'speak' to each other, polling and webhooks. In technical terms, webhooks are user defined HTTP callbacks that are triggered by specific events in an application. Let's break that down with a simpler example:
Imagine that your bank has a text messaging feature where you can send a text asking for the amount of money in your account. In response you get the current balance of the account. This is polling. In order to always know the latest balance you'll either need to know exactly when there will be a change of the account balance and send the text at that moment or you will have to frequently spam the text messaging feature with texts.
With webhooks you avoid that problem. Instead you'll tell the text messaging feature that this is my number and I want you to send a text whenever there's a change of my account balance.
This example shows you the three core parts of a webhook.
Destination - Your telephone number, where the text is to be sent
Trigger - Send the text whenever there's a change to the account balance
Payload - The updated account balance, which is the actual text
In the case of Albacross' application, this is essentially the same. There's no exact pattern to when you'll receive a new website visitor. Polling a public Albacross API would then result in the same problems as in the example of the account balance. With Webhooks Workflow you'll instead have a trigger that is defined by a new lead on your chosen Segment. This means that whenever a lead visits your website, Albacross will check if it fulfills your chosen Segment and if so, a trigger occurs in Albacross.
The destination, where the payload will be sent, is something that you choose. This can be something custom that you've set up in your internal systems or a third party API. The only important part is that you make sure that the destination can handle the format of the payload. In the Webhooks Workflow, you have different templates for the format of the payload where we've tried to cover the most requested use cases. If your use case requires a new template, please reach out to us on support. We're always happy to extend a feature in order to get you the most value possible.
Read the integration guide here