Identity Service · Customer Journey Analytics
Graph or stitching
Laura leaves a cart on her phone and buys days later from the home laptop, which Marcos also uses. Experience Platform decides who she is so it can act on her. Customer Journey Analytics decides who she was so it can measure. They do not always agree.
Example assumptions
Example people and identifiers. Lookback by CJA package: 7, 14 or 30 days on Select, Prime and Ultimate. Graph-based stitching requires Prime or higher.
Experience Platform · Profile and AJO
To activate: identity graph and Profile
Forward-looking and near real time. Profile uses the graph to gather fragments and merges them under its merge policy. Audiences, AJO and Destinations use that merged profile.
Customer Journey Analytics · connection
To measure: the person ID on each event
After the fact and per dataset. Replay can restate history inside the lookback window.
Architecture
Where it fits in the platform
Comparison between the identity graph and Customer Journey Analytics stitching, top to bottom in five stages. Data: web events from the Web SDK with the ECID, plus the CRMID on login, and a CRM in batch with CRMID and email. Data Lake: events and records land in their datasets, with the primary identity flagged as primary=true. Identity: the Data Lake passes identities to Identity Service, which links them in a graph with its Linking Rules. Separately, the event datasets reach the CJA connection, which sets one person ID per dataset. Resolution, to activate: the graph reaches Profile, which merges in real time according to its merge policy, and the merged profile goes out to AJO and Destinations to act. Audiences are evaluated on that merged profile under its merge policy, which uses the graph to gather related identities. Identity settings cannot be switched off without resetting the sandbox. Resolution, to measure, by two routes. Field-based stitching, from CJA Select, takes the persistent ID and the person ID from the same dataset. Graph-based stitching, from CJA Prime, takes the persistent ID, looks it up in the graph and gets back one namespace. It ignores timestamps and inherits graph quality. Use: both deliver one person ID per row to Workspace, for People and attribution, and replay restates history inside the lookback window. The shared key: the top-priority unique namespace in the graph should be the connection person ID. CJA audiences published to Profile send that person ID, and if no profile has that identity, a new one is created.
The recommendation
One person key, decided once, in the graph and in CJA
They are not two competing engines. The graph decides who a customer is in order to act. Stitching decides who a visitor was in order to measure. They work well when both use the same key.
- 01
Linking Rules before data arrives
The customer ID as the unique, top-priority namespace. Test it with Graph Simulation in development, because identity settings cannot be switched off without resetting the sandbox.
- 02
That same namespace as person ID
On every dataset in the CJA connection. That way they join, and the audiences CJA publishes to Profile land on profiles that already exist.
- 03
Field-based by default
It works from CJA Select if the key is on authenticated events. Graph-based, from Prime, aligns people with Profile but inherits any flaw in the graph.
- 04
Watch shared devices
Field-based splits people by time on the device. Graph-based ignores timestamps and assigns the whole device to one person.