Visitors Identity

What is it?

The Visitors Identity is used to uniquely identify and track visitors over time and across your products. There are 2 parts to it, the unique identifiers and the attributes.

The Visitors Identify is used by the SDKs to create and enrich the experimentation context from which exposure and goals events can be triggered.

Visitors Identifiers

The ABsmartly context needs to be initialised with your visitors' identifier(s). Those identifiers are used to uniquely identify visitors in experiments through exposure events and to link them to the goals events they are triggering as they use your products. What identifiers exist depends on where the experiment is running and what you know about the visitor at that moment.

Those tracking identifiers (also know as Units) need to be pre-registered on the ABsmartly platform, see Units for more details.

Below is an example on how the ABsmartly context can be initialised with 3 different unit types.

const request = {
  units: {
    user_id: "1234",
    anonymous_id: "c6bf86d8c5d81372b8c4ab641551bde6d8",
    deviceId: "345",
  },
};

const context = sdk.createContext(request);

info

Not all identifiers are equal, some, like user_id, allow for tracking visitors across sessions and even platforms. Others like anonymous_id are much more transient. This means that the same physical person could potentially have several anonymous_id (and as a result see a different variant of your experiment). This is the case for example when they use several devices or if they clear their cookies between different sessions. While an anonymous_id identifier is likey always available, the user_id might only be available in parts of the applications where the visitor is logged in.

Visitors Attributes

Visitors Attributes are used to enrich the ABsmartly context with any information you might have about this visitor, for example language, country, device, power_user, etc. Those attributes can then be used for creating targeting audiences (i.e. An experiment targeting only power users) or for segmenting data on your results page (i.e. Explore experiment results per device type).

context.attribute("user_agent", navigator.userAgent);

context.attributes({
  power_user: user.isPowerUser ? "yes" : "no",
  user_agent: navigator.userAgent,
  country: headers["HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY"],
  language: headers["Accept-Language"],
  channel: query_params.utm_medium,
});