Profile clean up
The BlueConic database will grow over time. For every new visitor to your site, a new profile is created. If visitors do not return within a reasonable amount of time, their profiles lose value when actions that took place long ago are less relevant. If these profiles do not contain any personal identifiable information, and visitors have not returned, these profiles blur the statistics on segment sizes, with the likeliness that these profiles ever will be activated are close to zero. In addition, they use costly database space.
We recommend that you add at least one clean up rule to automatically clean up non-identifiable profiles that haven't been active for 365 days.
Settings > General
In the Profile Clean up section, you can create rules that determine when a visitor profile is removed from the BlueConic database. The rules are based on a specific period of inactivity and they can also be enhanced by adding criteria based on one or more empty profile properties. Any visitor profile that matches a clean up rule is removed. The clean up of visitor profiles does not happen at a specific time — it is a continuous process.
All clean up rules are based on a period of inactivity. The start time of the period of inactivity is the last visited date/time. The minimum period of inactivity that a clean up rule can have is 90 days. If you create more than one clean up rule, they have an "OR" relationship with each other which means that multiple rules can be in force at the same time.
To create a clean up rule, follow these steps:
- Open the General settings page, and select [Add Rule] in the Profile clean up section.
- Enter the number of days, 90 or higher, in the input field. This is the number of days that the visitor profile must be inactive in order to satisfy the rule and trigger a clean up. To the right of the clean up rule, the number of visitor profiles that will be affected is shown along with the percentage of the total number of visitor profiles this represents. For example:
If the number of customer profiles affected by the clean up rule is more than 1% of the total number of profiles, the number of profiles affected and its percentage of the total appear in red as a warning to you that the rule will affect a significant number of visitor profiles. For example:
- Select [Save] at the top right of the page.
Note: "profiles that haven't been active for X days" are determined by the value of profile property "Last visit date". Profiles that have been imported by a connection but that have never visited a channel will have this profile property empty. Meaning: if no further constraints are configured, these newly imported profiles will match the clean up rule - and will be cleaned up shortly after importing!
Avoid problems by adding constraints to exclude imported profiles.