Knowledge Base

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:

  1. Open the General settings page, and select [Add Rule] in the Profile clean up section.
  2. 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 visitor 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:

  3. 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.

Adding constraints to a clean up rule

You can enhance a rule that triggers a clean up based not just on a specified period of inactivity but with the further constraint that one or more profile properties must be empty. In this case, the clean up rule can be, for example, "Purge all profiles that haven't been active for 150 days and the profile property Email is empty." This makes it possible to be much more specific regarding the circumstances under which a visitor profile is deleted.

To add a constraint to a clean up rule, follow these steps:

  1. In the clean up rule, click the "there are no further constraints" link.
  2. Select whether to purge profiles that are non-identifiable, or have an empty value for a selected profile property.
  3. Search for a profile property by name or click Advanced search.
  4. Select one or more profile properties that must be empty in order for the rule to be triggered. To search for a profile property, type a full or partial string in the text field. Note: Profile properties that are not selectable in the Segments tab appear in the list(s) of available profile properties in italic font. Typically these are profile properties that are not filterable such as email addresses, first and last names, and so forth.
  5. Click [Save]. The clean up rule and its constraint(s) are saved. For example:

    cleanup3.png
    In the example above, all visitor profiles older than 120 days with an empty "Email Address" profile property will be deleted.
  6. To modify a constraint, click it in the rule.

Exporting profiles to be cleaned up

Visitor profiles that are to be cleaned up can be exported in comma separated value (CSV) format. This makes it possible to examine the profiles in external applications. The export file contains the profile properties and their values of all visitor profiles that will be cleaned up. The Export function is only able to export a maximum of one million profiles.

To export the visitor profiles that will be cleaned up as a result of the defined rule(s), follow these steps:

  1. Click the "export" link that appears in the statistics at the far right of the clean up rule. Note: This can only be done prior to saving the clean up rule.
  2. Select where you want to save the file. By default the name of the export file is
    "BlueConic_Export_cleanup_[date (yyyymmdd)]_[time (hhmm)]".

Deleting a clean up rule

To delete a clean up rule, hover the mouse over it and click the Delete icon that appears to the right of the rule.