Identifiers

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Warning

Creating identifiers incorrectly can create significant issues for client data. If there's any question, always default to setting new identifiers as "Low Confidence" or creating an identifier as a standard field on the customer object.

Customer resolution and stitching

ODP utilizes Customer Identifiers (for example, emails, vuids, push_tokens) to merge users together and determine which event is associated with which customer.

Including one or more of these identifiers on an event identifies the user who performed the event and allows ODP to merge users together when enough information becomes available. See Overview of customer identity and resolution.

Default identifiers

Custom integration identifiers

Many applications and integrations (such as Shopify or Magento) create identifiers that map to an external system (such as Shopify ID) to provide improved user resolution, troubleshooting, and transparency. Some examples:

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Note

Every identifier is also stored as an array in the plural form (with up to 25 for each identifier type). For example, the emails for a customer are stored in a field called Emails (emails) and Cookie IDs are stored as vuids.

Custom external identifiers

If you have an external database, data lake, or system (for example, a point-of-sale system) that uses a unique identifier to track customers, ODP supports creating custom identifiers to ensure that known information about your customers is tracked and you can reconcile information within ODP with the external data source.

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Note

Custom Identifiers are considered when merging customers together.

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Important

At this time, only members of the ODP Customer Success team can create custom identifiers. Contact your Customer Success Manager or Support to learn more.

Identifier confidence

Identifiers are categorized into levels of confidence:

• High Confidence – Identifiers that, when seen, are unlikely to be shared across customers and devices (for example, Email, Phone Number, Shopify ID)
  • I have high confidence that this identifier can be used to merge customers together
• Low Confidence – Identifiers that are likely to be shared across devices and cannot be confidently associated with one person when a conflict is detected (for example, Cookie ID, Browser Push Token)
  • I have low confidence that this identifier can be used to merge customers together

Example 1 (shared device)

Your customers object looks like the following:

You receive an event:

This event seems to indicate that Jane is using a browser formerly associated with John. Because Cookie ID is a Low Confidence identifier, instead of merging these customers together, we will move the Cookie to now associate it with Jane:

If ODP merged these customers together, then every single person that shared that computer would be merged into one. So as a safety measure, the Cookie ID was moved.

Example 2 (integration/app)

Your customers object looks like the following:

You receive an event:

This event seems to indicate that John's Shopify account has a secondary email. Because Shopify ID is a High Confidence identifier, the customer records will be merged together:

Create identifiers

name: customers
identifiers:
  - name: acme_ios_push_token
    display_name: Acme iOS Push Token
    merge_confidence: high
    messaging: true

All identifiers must include one of the following suffixes:

• id
• hash
• number
• token
• alias
• address
• key

When an identifier is created, three fields are created:

• The plural version of the identifier (for example, ios_push_tokens) on the Customer that contains a list of 25 last seen identifiers for that customer.
• The singular version of the identifier (for example, ios_push_token) on the Customer that contains the last seen identifier for that customer.
• An event audit version that is populated when an event comes in with the singular version (for example, event_ios_push_token).

All events and data should use the singular version of the identifier name (for example, ios_push_token).