Introduction to Signals
Signals moves conversion and customer data from the places you already hold it to the advertising platforms that need it. You connect a source once, connect the destinations you advertise on, map your fields, and Signals keeps sending.
The problem it solves is narrow and expensive. Browser based tracking loses events to ad blockers, cookie restrictions and short cookie lifetimes, and the data you hold in a CRM, a warehouse or a point of sale system never reaches an ad platform at all. Signals sends server side, from systems you control.
Where Signals sits
Section titled “Where Signals sits”Signals is one product inside Datahash Studio. Studio is the overall platform, and Segments, Single View and the other Datahash products sit alongside Signals within it. You sign in to Studio once and work across all of them.
Sign in at https://studio.datahash.com/login. Two methods are available: email and password, or passwordless sign in using a one time password sent to your email or Sign in with Google.
Cloud and Core
Section titled “Cloud and Core”Signals runs in two deployment models, and the difference is whose cloud it runs in.
| Model | Where it runs |
|---|---|
| Datahash Cloud | Hosted on the Datahash cloud. Nothing to provision or operate on your side. |
| Datahash Core | Hosted on your own cloud, so data stays within your perimeter. |
What a signal is
Section titled “What a signal is”A signal is any event coming from a source and going into a destination. The unit is the delivery, not the event, so the same event sent to two platforms counts as two signals.
For data collected from batch sources such as a CRM, cloud storage or FTP, every line of information uploaded counts as one signal.
What connects to what
Section titled “What connects to what”Sources are grouped in Studio by where the data lives: API, App, CRM, Database, File and storage, Lead generation, Messaging ads, Warehouse, and Website and E-commerce.
Destinations are grouped by what the data is for: Web Conversions, Messaging Conversions, App Conversions, Offline Conversions, Lead Conversions, Custom Audience, Product Catalog, CRM, Files and delivery, and Warehouse.
Not every source can feed every destination. The valid combinations are set per use case, and each use case page lists them. Start from Use cases rather than from the connector catalog if you are not sure which pairing you need.
The platforms you can send to include Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, Reddit and OpenAI, plus your own CRM, files, databases and warehouse.
How your data is handled
Section titled “How your data is handled”Datahash does not store the first party data it processes. Events and records pass through, get normalized and hashed, and go out to the destinations you configured. What Datahash does store is your own account data: company profile, user records and the configuration of your connections and mappings.
Personal identifiers are normalized and hashed with SHA-256 before they reach any destination. Hash them at source wherever you can. Where you cannot, Signals does it for you. Hashing is one way, so a hash cannot be reversed back to the original value.
Datahash Studio holds a SOC 2 Type 2 report and an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate, and Signals runs on that platform. The SOC 2 report covers the Security, Confidentiality and Availability criteria.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- How Signals works for the path an event takes from source to destination.
- Core concepts & terminology for the vocabulary used across these pages.
- Quickstart to connect your first source and destination.
- Use cases to find the pairing that matches what you are trying to do.