How to Implement User Identification Across Anonymous and Known Sessions
Users are anonymous before signup and identified after. Here's how to stitch these sessions together for complete journey analytics.
Most website visitors are anonymous. When they eventually sign up, create an account, or submit a form, their identity is known. The challenge is connecting their anonymous browsing history with their identified profile to see the complete journey.
Identity stitching uses a combination of first-party cookies, event-based identification, and alias calls. Before identification, the analytics tool assigns an anonymous ID stored in a cookie. At the moment of identification (signup, login, form submission), the anonymous ID is aliased to the known user ID, merging all previous anonymous activity into the identified profile.
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We cover the implementation for Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, and Segment, the timing and placement of identify calls, the edge cases that cause stitching failures (multiple devices, cleared cookies, shared computers), and the data validation process that confirms stitching is working correctly.
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