Customer Journey Analytics · Person ID
Who is one person to CJA?
The Martín family shares one account at an online shop: one login, one account ID and one household email. Each of them also has a club card with their own customer ID. CJA counts people by the field you choose as person ID. Change the field and see who each event goes to.
Example assumptions
Example family, IDs, devices, events and figures. The split of rows with no person ID on shared devices is simplified.
Customer Journey Analytics · connection
Who CJA attributes each event to
One row per real person and one column per day. The border shows who it was; the label, the person CJA counts.
Analysis · consequences
What breaks in the analysis
What an analyst will see with this set-up, and what to change.
Architecture
Where it fits in the platform
Comparison between the identity graph and Customer Journey Analytics stitching, top to bottom in five stages. Data: web events from the Web SDK with the ECID, plus the CRMID on login, and a CRM in batch with CRMID and email. Data Lake: events and records land in their datasets, with the primary identity flagged as primary=true. Identity: the Data Lake passes identities to Identity Service, which links them in a graph with its Linking Rules. Separately, the event datasets reach the CJA connection, which sets one person ID per dataset. Resolution, to activate: the graph reaches Profile, which merges in real time according to its merge policy, and the merged profile goes out to AJO and Destinations to act. Audiences are evaluated on that merged profile under its merge policy, which uses the graph to gather related identities. Identity settings cannot be switched off without resetting the sandbox. Resolution, to measure, by two routes. Field-based stitching, from CJA Select, takes the persistent ID and the person ID from the same dataset. Graph-based stitching, from CJA Prime, takes the persistent ID, looks it up in the graph and gets back one namespace. It ignores timestamps and inherits graph quality. Use: both deliver one person ID per row to Workspace, for People and attribution, and replay restates history inside the lookback window. The shared key: the top-priority unique namespace in the graph should be the connection person ID. CJA audiences published to Profile send that person ID, and if no profile has that identity, a new one is created.
The recommendation
A person is a customer, not an account or a device
The account ID meets the technical requirements of a person ID and still merges three people. The person ID has to represent one person.
- 01
The customer ID, in every dataset
Use the customer ID as person ID. Website, app and shop must all use the same one: if each dataset uses a different one, they do not join.
- 02
Choose the buyer on the family account
If the login belongs to the account, ask who is buying and send their customer ID. When there is none, leave the field empty rather than sending Undefined.
- 03
The account as a dimension, not a person
If what you want to analyse is the account, it goes in as a dimension, or as an Account ID in B2B, not as a person.
- 04
Check stitching against active customers
Compare people in CJA with active customers for the period. Far more means devices or IDs with mixed case are being counted. Fewer means shared accounts.
Explore this decision
- The purchase is in AEP. Where does it go missing in CJA?
Trace a purchase missing from CJA through the dataset, connection, historical import, data view and filters before loading the data again.