Step 7 - Identifying Customers

• Exercise
• Takeaways

See https://gist.github.com/eskfung/6767977 for an example of how to identify customers. This is taken from the code for the Kissmetrics app.

Unless you absolutely want to track accounts instead of people, do not call identify with the same argument for multiple people. That irreversibly treats all of your customers as one person, and makes our reporting unmeaningful, and you will have to start over with an entirely new API key.

Exercise

Takeaways

• Identifying your customers by email address works best in the majority of cases, although you can use any unique string or integer.
  • Email address is effective because you’ll be able to combine data collected by our JavaScript with any Kissmetrics integrations you enable. These typically record data to the email addresses available to that service.
  • Segmenting your reports by Customer ID (email address) becomes much more readable.
• identify designates who a person is, for this browsing session and future sessions.
  • We’ll save the value to a first party cookie km_ai. This keeps a person identified across pages where you omit the API call, and across browsing sessions.
  • Look up the value of the km_ai cookie if you need to refer to a person’s ID. More on this in the next section.
• Calling identify with our JavaScript also links with a person’s anonymous placeholder ID.