An attribute is a defining characteristic of an entity. Examples:

• Location: Nigeria
• Last login: Yesterday

Attributes make it easy to identify the characteristics of an entity and also group entities. At Engage, you can also use attributes to create customer segments e.g. “Customers with age above 55”.

Attributes and tags are similar in what they do but they are not the same thing. Tags are just labels – they only have values. Attributes have names that add more context to the values. Imagine we want to add a customer’s age to their profile. We can do this as an attribute like this: age = 23. But adding the tag “23” wouldn’t make sense because there is no context to what the number represents. This doesn’t mean tags can’t be hacked to add the context. We can for example tag the customer “age_23” instead of just 23. That works but adds a new complexity if we need to use the tag for customer segmentation. It’s easy to get all customers tagged “age_23” but what of customers older than or younger than 23?