In BlueConic, a unique identifier is a BlueConic profile property value that distinctly recognizes a specific customer or visitor. For example, there are several types of customer data that uniquely identify your customers:
- Email address
- Login name
- Customer ID
- Mobile phone number
- Your organization's unique identifier: account number, subscriber number, etc.
Identity resolution makes unique identifiers invaluable
By gathering data that uniquely identifies your customers, you can better target and reach those customers with personalized content or offers. By matching several profiles together based on a single unique identifier (for both known and anonymous users), you can unify your customer data by merging profiles that belong to the same person. This process is called identity resolution. Additionally, BlueConic connections enable you to match customer profiles with external data sources by matching these profile identifiers with the other systems.
What makes a profile property a unique identifier?
In order for a profile property to be unique, only one profile should contain the same value. So while each customer has only one zip code or postal code, many customers share the same postal code. So the zip code or postal code does not qualify as a unique identifier.
How to collect unique customer identifiers with BlueConic
BlueConic offers Listeners that collect customer data and attributes from site visits, forms, customer behavior, interests, actions, and events. Listeners can collect data on your website, native mobile apps, and AMP pages.
For example, using an order form or subscription signup form, you can collect customers' email addresses, which are valuable identifiers unique to each customer.
How are unique identifiers stored in BlueConic?
BlueConic stores customer data in profile properties. You can specify that a profile property holds unique identifiers by selecting the Unique identifier checkbox in the Profile properties tab. For improved privacy and security, you can specify that a new profile should be created if this profile property value changes by selecting the box for "Create new profile when identifier changes". This would prevent profile information merging into a new profile erroneously. Each profile can have multiple identifiers.
To ensure data privacy, when you specify that a profile property contains information that uniquely identifies a profile, the data sensitivity settings are updated to PII (for personally identifiable information) and permission level 2. Learn more about data sensitivity and data visibility settings for storing PII in BlueConic.
In the Profiles tab, you can search your profile database to find all profiles that have a value for a certain unique ID.
Data marked with a data sensitivity of PII is visible only to BlueConic users whose role has privileges to view sensitive data. See the users and roles documentation for details.
Using unique identifiers in BlueConic Connections
You can use BlueConic connections to integrate or synchronize your profile data with customer data held in other systems. By matching unique identifiers with another system -- for example, matching the email address from a customer's profile with your ESP data -- you can ensure that you're importing or exporting data for the correct profile.
Note: If there are values stored in a profile property before you activate the "Is unique identifier" checkbox, and you plan to use these values for matching in a connection, contact your Customer Success Manager for assistance.
Using Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) with BlueConic
By using connections with The Trade Desk and Unified ID 2.0, you can also use UID2 identifiers to set up marketing campaigns without using PII data or third-party cookies.
Merging profiles based on unique identifiers
Using the profile merging feature in BlueConic, you can consolidate disparate profiles based on rules and matching unique identifiers. Collecting unique identifiers in your customer profiles enables you to accurately merge profiles that belong to the same person. See Profile merging for details on how merge rules rely on unique identifiers to determine when two or more profiles can be merged.
Visualizing and measuring unique customer identifiers
Increasing the number of unique identifiers you collect in your profile database is an important measure of success in building your unified customer data. To measure the number of profiles that contain unique identifiers, BlueConic provides a Profile Recognition Dashboard so you can see at a glance how many profiles are known by a unique identifier and track your customer recognition ratio over time. The Profile Recognition Dashboard is available from your BlueConic home window, or by searching for it in the Global Search box at the top right corner of the BlueConic window.
Learn how to increase your customer recognition ratio with BlueConic.