Amazon Pinpoint

This page describes how to use Census with Amazon Pinpoint.

Getting Started

There are essentially three groups of credentials that Census requires to connect to Pinpoint:

The name of an S3 bucket that has been created in your AWS account, which Census will use for staging data to be imported into Pinpoint
Access keys that will allow us to read and write to both the S3 bucket and Pinpoint
An importer role ARN. This is an identifier for a role that you will need to create in your AWS account. This role is passed to AWS’s Pinpoint import service, and will enable the import of segments from the S3 staging bucket into Pinpoint.

Here’s a list of steps for creating the necessary resources and establishing a connection:

Locate your Pinpoint instance and note its Project ID. Also note the AWS Region in which your Pinpoint instance resides.

Create an S3 bucket that Census can use for staging Pinpoint data. The S3 bucket should be created in the same region as your Pinpoint instance. We recommend naming it census-pinpoint-staging.
Open AWS IAM and create a new role. For “trusted entity type”, choose “Custom Trust Policy”. Use this trust policy:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "Service": "pinpoint.amazonaws.com"
            },
            "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
        }
    ]
}

Now attach the permissions policy AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess to your role (if you’d like to restrict the access scope further, you can create a custom permissions policy that only allows access to the census-pinpoint-staging bucket.) Continue and choose a name for your role (we recommend CensusPinpointSegmentImporter). Finally, click on the newly created role and note the role’s ARN.

Using a user in your AWS account with read/write access to the newly created S3 bucket and read/write access to your Pinpoint instance, go into AWS security credentials and create a new access key. Note the Access Key ID and Secret Key.

Open the Destinations page in Census, click “New Destination”, and find Pinpoint. Now, enter the credentials that you previously noted down (Access Key ID, Secret Key, Pinpoint Project ID, S3 Staging Bucket Name, Importer Role ARN, AWS Region). Click “Connect” and ensure that the credentials test succeeds. You should now be ready to start syncing to Pinpoint!
(Highly recommended) Adjust your s3 staging bucket settings to expire objects after 7 days, so that s3 cleans up old staging data.

Staging bucket cleanup

Set up your staging bucket expiry policies to clean up old staging data:

Find the "Management" tab for your bucket in S3:

Click "Create lifecycle rule". Give it a descriptive name like "Delete objects after 7 days"
In the rule configuration, apply the rule to all objects in the bucket, select the action "Expire current versions of objects", and set the expiry to 7 days after creation.