Profiles and Identity Resolution

Lytics classifies user profiles into two distinct buckets, anonymous and known users. Any user who visits your page with the Lytics JavaScript Tag installed is assigned an anonymous, unique identifier stored in a cookie. Without any other identifying user data, they will remain anonymous within Lytics. By collecting anonymous web behavior, you’ll be able to build audiences based on their unique behavior for targeting in marketing tools that do not require firm identifiers, such as ad tools and web personalization.

As more data fragments are merged together, user profiles become more robust and allow for building more detailed audiences. If the data displayed on a user profile doesn’t match your expectations, please contact Lytics support to verify your implementation and identity resolution strategy.

Known users are typically imported into Lytics from your existing business systems, such as email service providers (ESP) or customer relationship managers (CRM), and each user record imported has a data field that acts as a unique identifier. This is most commonly an email address, but can be any unique identifier. Known users can also be identified from your website through existing forms or login systems, which can then be collected within Lytics.

Lytics will create multiple profiles for the same user, an anonymous web profile AND known profile with associated data fragments until the unique identifier is seen across another fragmented user profile. Lytics will then merge the original, separate profiles, unifying all collected user data, into a single user profile. This data can then be daisy-chained across a nearly unlimited number of data sources as long as there is an overlapping identifier between data streams.

There are several ways that an identifier can be sent to Lytics from different streams.

There are three main ways to pass known customer data into a Lytics profile from your website:

1. Leverage Lytics Personalize to capture email address onsite. These email addresses will automatically be appended to the anonymous _uid set by the Lytics JavaScript Tag. If the same email address has been seen in another data stream, all corresponding customer data will be collapsed into one profile.

2. Send the identifier as soon as it exists using the Lytics JavaScript Tag. Our tag makes collection of web data very easy and comes packed with several integrations to streamline collection of data depending on where it resides.

• Recommended: Send from your source code or tag manager using the jstag.send function which allows for collection of any arbitrary JavaScript object as a result of any on-site action.
• From a 1st party cookie using our built in cookie collection integration.
• From a query parameter using our built in query parameter collection integration.
• From a global JavaScript variable, also commonly referred to as a "data layer" by tag managers, using our built in JavaScript global variable collection integration.

Any link that you include in an email that directs users to a page with the Lytics tag installed should be personalized to include a query string with a non-personally identifiable information (PII) identifier. By passing this identifier (usually a hashed email or ESP-specific user_id), Lytics can then merge web and email activity as described above. The Lytics customer success team can work with you to determine the most appropriate identifier to pass in URL strings and map to your Lytics account. Our integration documentation includes specific instructions for dynamically inserting these links for popular ESPs.