Identity Resolution Management

To build winning marketing campaigns, you need to know your target audience first. While doing so, you might see that identification and unification terms are generally mentioned together. To manage your users to offer them the best products or services they might like, it is important to know the difference between two definitions. 

Identification and unification of users across different channels and devices are some of the most essential parts of accurate profile handling. They play a crucial role in the heart of every business.

Identification is basically to spot users and know who they are.  In other words, an anonymous user becomes a “known user” when they have been recognized with identifiers such as their email addresses, phone numbers, etc.

Unification is to bring  the known users' data between different platforms such as mobile, web, API, etc together. It is also to unify the data between different devices on the same platform. For example, a user may use two different browsers, when they are identified, their data in different browsers will be unified based on most recent activities.

The preliminary of “unification” is “identification”. You cannot unify user’s data between different platforms unless you identify them; because you don’t know who the user is on different platforms. Knowing this, Insider offers you a variety of settings to customize your Identification Flow and its logic by aiming for the most accurate profile handling.

To identify and unify the user data, Insider uses certain identifiers and values. For example, if the email address is the identifier that your business uses, the user visits your website and leaves their email address, so the user profile is created on your end with it. When you provide the related identifiers such as email address, Insider can utilize them to differentiate users from the other profiles regardless of the platform. In other words, as long as they log in to your website with the registered email address, they will be counted as the same user. 

User profiles are managed with 3 different possibilities upon receiving an identification request.

• Creating a new user profile: If Insider cannot find any existing user profile for the identifiers in the request, then a new user profile will be created and a profile ID will be assigned for the user.

For example, the user visits your website on desktop, and registers with their email address for the first time. Then, Insider will create a user profile ID for them along with the data stored when they were anonymous, and it will be associated with their email address regardless of the platform.

• Add to existing user profile: If Insider finds an existing user profile that matches the identifiers, the incoming request will be tried to associate with the existing user profile. If the final user profile overrides the identity management rules, limit & priority configurations will act accordingly. 

For example, the user registers to your website on the desktop, and visits your website on the mobile later on. Since they already have a profile ID, the data will be inserted on the same profile ID.

• Merge existing profiles: Insider allows you to use multiple identifiers for a user. If Insider finds several existing profiles that are associated with the incoming identification request, then the merging action of these user profiles will be tried with respect to limit & priority configurations. 

For example, you use email address and phone number as identifiers and you might not receive both at the same time. You collect the user’s email address on your website and their phone number in your brick and mortar store and share this offline information with Insider too. Two different user profiles are created for that user; one is associated with the email address and the other one is with the phone number. Then, the user visits your website and leaves their phone number on their account. In this case, the identity request including both the email address and phone number is received, even though there are two different profiles on Insider, since they share the same identifiers, they are merged.

To gain a better understanding of Identity Resolution Management, you can refer to the articles listed below:

• Identity Resolution Management Settings
• FAQ about Identity Resolution Management
• Using Phone Number as Identifier
• Using Email Address as Identifier