Mobile-to-web and cross-domain ID sharing

Overview

The Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK supports visitor ID sharing capabilities that enable customers to deliver personalized experiences more accurately, between mobile apps and mobile web content, and across domains.

Use cases use-cases

Deliver consistent personalization between mobile apps and mobile websites

A clothing company wants to personalize their customers’ experience based on their interests, and keep the personalization accurate in a mobile application that also loads WebViews. By using the mobile-to-web ID sharing feature, they can ensure that the most accurate offers are presented to customers, using the same visitor identifier in the app and mobile web content by passing the ECID to the mobile web URL.

Deliver consistent personalization across domains

A retailer with multiple online stores wants to personalize the shopper experience across their domains, based on customer interests. Using the Web SDK cross-domain ID sharing feature, the retailer can deliver accurate offers based on customer interests, across all of their domains.

Enhance visitor activity reporting

A technology retailer wants to improve their visitor activity reporting with information on when their visitors move from the mobile application to their mobile website, or to their other domains. Using the Web SDK cross-domain ID sharing feature, the marketing team can accurately track visitors across their web properties and generate activity reports.

Prerequisites prerequisites

To use mobile-to-web and cross-domain ID sharing, you must use Web SDK version 2.11.0 or later.

For Edge Network mobile implementations, this feature is supported in the Identity for Edge Network extension starting with version 1.1.0 (iOS and Android).

This feature is also compatible with VisitorAPI.js version 1.7.0 or later.

Mobile-to-web ID sharing mobile-to-web

Use the getUrlVariables API from the Identity for Edge Network extension to retrieve the identifiers as query parameters and attach them to your URL when opening webViews.

No additional configuration is required for the Web SDK to accept ECID values in the query string.

The query string parameter includes:

Mobile-to-web ID sharing uses the adobe_mc parameter. When the adobe_mc parameter is present and valid, the ECID from the query string is automatically added to the identity map in the first request made to the Edge Network. All subsequent Edge Network interactions will use that ECID.

For more information on how to pass visitor IDs from a mobile app to a WebView, see the documentation on handling WebViews.

Cross-domain ID sharing cross-domain-sharing

For cross-domain ID sharing, Web SDK version 2.11.0 adds support for the appendIdentityToUrl command. When used, this command generates the adobe_mc query string parameter.

The command accepts an object with one property, url, and returns an object with the property url.

This command does not wait for any consent update. If consent has not been provided, the URL is returned unchanged.

If an ECID is not provided, the /acquire endpoint will be called to generate an ECID.

Below is an example of how a customer can implement cross-domain ID sharing on their website.

This code adds an event listener for all the clicks on the page, and if the click was on a link to a matching domain (in this case adobe.com or behance.com), adds the identity to the URL and redirects the user there.

document.addEventListener("click", event => {
  const anchor = event.target.closest("a");
  if (!anchor || !anchor.href) {
    return;
  }
  const url = new URL(anchor.href);
  if (!url.hostname.endsWith("adobe.com") && !url.hostname.endsWith("behance.com")) {
    return;
  }
  event.preventDefault();
  alloy("appendIdentityToUrl", { url: anchor.href }).then(result => {
    document.location = result.url;
  });
});

Using the Tags extension tags-extension

Similar to using the Web SDK, there is no additional configuration required in the Tags extension to use identities passed through the URL.

To use mobile-to-web and cross-domain ID sharing through the Tags extension, you must use version 2.12.0 or later of the Tags extension.

To share identities from the current page to other domains, there is a new action available in the Web SDK Tags extension. This action is designed to be used with a Core - Click event type and a value comparison condition.

Follow the steps described here to create a rule with the following configuration:

The Redirect with identity action will stop the browser from navigating through to the link. Then, it will call the appendIdentityToUrl method on the Web SDK instance.

Finally, it redirects the user to the URL with the adobe_mc query string parameter appended.