Customer IDs and Authentication States
Along with the Experience Cloud visitor ID, you can associate additional customer IDs and an authentication status with each visitor.
Authentication States
The setCustomerIDs method accepts multiple customer IDs for the same visitor. This helps you identify or target an individual user across different devices. For example, you can upload these IDs as customer attributes to the Experience Cloud and access this data across the different solutions.
setCustomerIDs (customer ID synchronization) is required by customer attributes and core services functionality. Synching customer IDs is an optional identification method for Analytics. Target requires Visitor.AuthState.AUTHENTICATED for Customer Attributes to work. See Core Services - How to Enable Your Solutions for examples.Beginning with Experience Cloud Identity Service v1.5+, setCustomerIDs includes the optional AuthState object. AuthState identifies visitors according to their authentication status (e.g., logged in, logged out). You set the authentication state with a status value listed in the table. Authentication status is returned as an integer.
Unknown or never authenticated.
Unknown is applied by default when AuthState is not used with a visitor ID or not explicitly set on each page or app context.
Authenticated for a particular instance, page, or app.
Attention: To work properly, Customer Attributes for Target require this status.
Use Cases for Authentication States
You can assign authentication states to your users, depending on the actions they are performing on your web properties and whether they are authenticated. See some examples in the table below:
This state could be used for scenarios such as:
- Reading an email (this action likely means that the reader is the intended recipient, but the email could also have been forwarded).
- Clicking through from an email to a landing page.
Set Customer IDs and Authenticated States
Customer IDs can include combinations of IDs and authenticated states as shown in the following examples.
- IDs are case-sensitive.
- Only use unencoded values for your IDs.
- Customer IDs and authentication states are not stored in the visitor ID cookie. They must be set for every page or application context.
- You should not include any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the customer IDs. If you are using PII to identify a visitor (such as an email address), we recommend storing a hashed or encrypted version of the information instead. The ECID library provides support for hashing user identifiers. See SHA256 Hashing Support for setCustomerIDs.
// Single ID with a single authentication state
visitor.setCustomerIDs({
"userid":{
"id":"67312378756723456",
"authState":Visitor.AuthState.AUTHENTICATED
}
});
/*
Multiple IDs with only the first ID explicitly assigned an authentication state.
The second ID is not explicitly assigned an authentication state and is implicitly
assigned Visitor.AuthState.Unknown by default.
*/
visitor.setCustomerIDs({
"userid":{
"id":"67312378756723456",
"authState":Visitor.AuthState.AUTHENTICATED
},
"dpuuid":"550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000"
});
// Multiple IDs with identical authentication states
visitor.setCustomerIDs({
"userid":{
"id":"67312378756723456",
"authState":Visitor.AuthState.AUTHENTICATED
},
"dpuuid":{
"id":"550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
"authState":Visitor.AuthState.AUTHENTICATED
}
});
// Multiple IDs with different authentication states
visitor.setCustomerIDs({
"userid":{
"id":"67312378756723456",
"authState":Visitor.AuthState.AUTHENTICATED
},
"dpuuid":{
"id":"550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
"authState":Visitor.AuthState.LOGGED_OUT
}
});
Return Customer IDs and Authenticated States
Use getCustomerIDs to return customer IDs and related authenticated states. This method returns a visitor’s authenticated state as an integer.
Syntax
getCustomerIDs returns data with the following syntax.
{
[customerIDType1]:{
"id":[customerID1],
"authState":[authState1]
},
[customerIDType2]:{
"id":[customerID2],
"authState":[authState2]
}
...
}
Examples
Returned customer IDs and authentication state data should look similar to the following examples.
Object customerIDs = visitor.getCustomerIDs();
// No setCustomerIDs call on this instance
{}
// setCustomerIDs call on this instance with {"userid":{"id":"67312378756723456"}}
{
"userid":{
"id":"67312378756723456",
"authState":0
}
}
// setCustomerIDs call on this instance with {"userid":{"id":"67312378756723456","authState":Visitor.AuthState.AUTHENTICATED}}
{
"userid":{
"id":"67312378756723456",
"authState":1
}
}
// setCustomerIDs call on this instance with {"userid":{"authState":Visitor.AuthState.LOGGED_OUT}}
{
"userid":{
"authState":2
}
}
// setCustomerIDs call on this instance with {"userid":{"authState":Visitor.AuthState.LOGGED_OUT},"dpuuid":{"id":"550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000"}}
{
"userid":{
"authState":2
},
"dpuuid":{
"id":"550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
"authState":0
}
}
SDK Support
The Experience Cloud ID service supports customer IDs and authentication states in our Android and iOS SDK code. See the following code libraries:
Notice for Analytics and Audience Manager Customers
If you’re passing declared IDs to Audience Manager, the userid object needs to match the integration code associated with a data source. For more information, see the Visitor ID Service section in the Configure Merge Rules Code documentation.