Identity

When someone moves from your marketing site to your app on another domain, the browser treats them as a stranger. Identity keeps them as the same person, and shows you how well that is working.

Updated

Why it matters

Say your site is acme.com and your app is acme.app. Without help, a visitor who clicks Start free trial becomes a new, anonymous person on the app. Your funnel from pricing to sign-up then shows a drop that never happened, and your referrer and UTM reports lose the campaign that brought them.

Carry identity between domains

  1. Open Sources › Identity (also under Settings).
  2. Check that every domain you own is listed. Click Add a domain for any that are missing.
  3. Turn on Carry identity between these domains.

Links between listed domains are then tagged with a short _ccid parameter, so the next page knows who arrived. You don’t need to change your markup. Changes apply to future visits, not to people already seen. How the tracker handles domains is covered in Domains and identity.

Is it working?

The Is it working card shows Kept the same ID across a hop: of the people who followed a link from one listed domain to another and arrived within 30 minutes, the share whose first event already carried an ID we knew. It covers the last 30 days, with a row for each hop, such as acme.com → acme.app.

  • 80% or more is healthy.
  • Below 80% is flagged as needs attention.

The same number appears at the top of funnels and experiments that span two sources, so you know whether to trust the handover. It measures the raw hand-off only. Manual merges don’t change it.

Identify, devices and merges

  • Carrying joins one visit across domains, while the person is still anonymous.
  • Identify joins everything once you know who they are. The first browser to identify with a user ID becomes the person’s main record. Later browsers that identify with the same ID are linked to it automatically, with their earlier history.
  • Merge joins two records by hand. See People and profiles.

Tips and gotchas

  • Only listed domains carry. A new domain needs adding here, or in the Add source dialog, before links to it are tagged.
  • Redirects can drop the parameter. If a hop is below 80%, check that redirects between your domains keep the query string.
  • Subdomains of the same site, such as www.acme.com and app.acme.com, are listed too, marked as subdomains.

Recipes

Follow visitors from our site into our app.

  1. Make sure the site and the app are both sources in the same project.
  2. In Identity, turn on Carry identity between these domains.
  3. A day later, check Kept the same ID across a hop for the site → app hop.
At 80% or more, funnels from the pricing page to sign-up count the same people end to end.

A hop reads 42%. Why?

  1. Check that both domains are listed and receiving.
  2. Open Realtime, then click a link from your site to your app yourself. Open both pageviews in Event details: they should name the same person.
  3. If they don’t, look for a redirect between the two domains that drops the query string, where the _ccid tag travels. The tracker removes the tag from the address bar once it has read it.

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