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Custom Traits

Custom traits are user or account traits collected from the Identify calls you send to Segment. For example, these could be demographics like age or gender, account-specific like plan, or even things like whether a user has seen a particular A/B test variation. From your sources, send custom traits as pieces of information that you know about a user in an Identify call.

As opposed to computed traits which are computed from your source data, or SQL Traits which are computed from warehouse data, custom traits are created from source events you pass into Segment and have no trait limits.

Comparing trait types

View the table below to better understand how Segment collects custom, computed, and SQL traits.

You can use the Profile explorer (Unify > Profile explorer) to view traits attached to a profile.

Trait type	Description
Custom traits	Traits created from source events you pass into Segment. From your sources, send custom traits as pieces of information that you know about a user in an Identify call.
Computed traits	Traits collected from computations off of event and event property data from your sources. Create user or account-level calculations like `most_viewed_page` or `total_num_orders` for a customer. Learn more by viewing types of computed traits.
SQL traits	Traits created by running SQL queries on data in your warehouse. SQL traits are a type of computed trait. SQL traits help you import traits from your data warehouse back into Segment to build audiences or enhance data that you send to other destinations.

Using custom traits

Here's the payload of a typical Identify call with custom traits (with most common fields removed):

1{
2  "type": "identify",
3  "traits": {
4    "name": "John Smith",
5    "email": "john@example.com",
6    "plan": "premium",
7    "logins": 5
8  },
9  "userId": "97980cfea0067"
10}

And here's the corresponding JavaScript event that would generate the above payload:

1analytics.identify("97980cfea0067", {
2  name: "John Smith",
3  email: "john@example.com",
4  plan: "premium",
5  logins: 5
6});

(success)

Success!

Any source event where there's a traits object and key value pairs generates custom traits.

Custom traits are mutable and update to the latest value seen by the user's Identify events.

When an audience that previously generated Identify events is deleted, the data for the audience key is still attached to profiles that entered the audience and becomes visible in Segment as a custom trait.

Reserved custom traits

Segment has reserved some custom traits that have semantic meanings for users and handles them in special ways. For example, Segment always expects email to be a string of the user's email address. Segment sends this on to destinations, like Mailchimp, that require an email address for their tracking.

(warning)

Warning

Only use reserved custom traits for their intended meaning.

Reserved custom traits Segment has standardized:

Trait	Type	Description
`address`	Object	Street address of a user optionally containing: `city`, `country`, `postalCode`, `state`, or `street`
`age`	Number	Age of a user
`avatar`	String	URL to an avatar image for the user
`birthday`	Date	User's birthday
`company`	Object	Company the user represents, optionally containing: `name` (String), `id` (String or Number), `industry` (String), `employee_count` (Number) or `plan` (String)
`createdAt`	Date	Date the user's account was first created. Segment recommends using ISO-8601 date strings.
`description`	String	Description of the user
`email`	String	Email address of a user
`firstName`	String	First name of a user
`gender`	String	Gender of a user
`id`	String	Unique ID in your database for a user
`lastName`	String	Last name of a user
`name`	String	Full name of a user. If you only pass a first and last name Segment automatically fills in the full name for you.
`phone`	String	Phone number of a user
`title`	String	Title of a user, usually related to their position at a specific company. Example: "VP of Engineering"
`username`	String	User's username. This should be unique to each user, like the usernames of Twitter or GitHub.
`website`	String	Website of a user

To learn more about using an Identify call to tie custom traits to profiles, visit Segment's Identify documentation.