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Accelerate your eCommerce growth and become an analytics and tracking expert. Join Elevar's Founder & CEO, Brad Redding, as he discusses how to address data collection issues that D2C brands face today. Plus you'll learn real world examples of transforming data into insights to help your business grow faster.
Alright. Welcome back to another episode of the conversion tracking playbook. Today, we are going through user identification, AKA user ID, and 3 things to know about user ID, which is relevant for everyone listening. If you're listening, this is relevant for your tracking. It's relevant for your personalization.
Speaker 1:It is relevant for your ad performance. So, John, let's just get right into it with user IDs and the definition and or fragility. I did not mess that word up. So this is the first take, by the way. I was I was having fear about messing that up.
Speaker 1:Alright. So user IDs. I'll let you take this first one, and I'll take, the second thing to know.
Speaker 2:Before we start, though, let's preface this with we're making some simplifying assumptions. So for those of you experts out there, please don't nail us to the wall. We can't cover every nuance here. We're talking about user ID in a very general sense. And sometimes that different definition changes per channel, like j four has a user ID, but we're talking one level up from that on the grand scale of an identification value that helps identify you to a destination.
Speaker 2:So that'll all hopefully sound a lot more simple after we get through this. But, we can think of a user ID sort of like an account ID. And I want you to put yourself in the shoes of something like GA 4, and hopefully that will make you or help you understand what's going on with the mechanisms here. So think about if you're GA 4. What happens is you're getting essentially phone calls.
Speaker 2:Okay. Somebody's going to phone you and they're going to say, Hey, I just added something to my cart. And then they're going to hang up the phone. They don't keep the line open. That's just the nature of the Internet.
Speaker 2:They hang up the phone, and there's no caller ID here. There's no voice recognition. You have no idea who this person is. All you know is they said, hey. I added something to my cart.
Speaker 2:And then suddenly another phone rings, and somebody says, hey. I just viewed an item. And then suddenly another phone rings, and this process goes on and on and on. How do you make sense of that? There's no way to connect the events.
Speaker 2:You don't know who's who. All you could really do is count events. You could say, like, well, I received a 100 phone calls that said people added to cart, but that's not really what we want. We wanna know about the user's journey. So if you were running GA 4, you would probably come up with some mechanism, kinda like an account ID, where when somebody calls, you say, okay.
Speaker 2:You're you added something to your cart, but what's your account ID? What's the what's your user ID? And they tell you it's 123. And then you write that down, and you can keep a log of what that person with account ID 123 has done. And every time somebody calls, you say, hey.
Speaker 2:What's your account ID? Okay. And you start recording all these actions with the account ID keeping things together for you. So this account ID, we use it all the time. If you call your cable company, they're probably gonna ask you for an account ID.
Speaker 2:It's the exact same mechanism here. We need some sort of identification to keep the user journey together, and that's what we're talking about with user IDs. It's really important to remember that this phone call that happens, there's a hang up after every single event. It's not kept open, so you can't put the pieces together unless you have some sort of you unifying account. That's really the heart of this.
Speaker 2:That that's what we're talking about. Did I miss anything big, Brad?
Speaker 1:No. I think that's great. Bring it up in the context of a phone call. I think it makes sense versus just getting into the nuances and the technicalities of a browser and a network panel and network requests and cookies. That that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Good. So the next important piece is these user IDs are typically device based. They don't go across devices.
Speaker 2:So you have a user ID. It lives in your browser. It lives in a cookie, and we'll talk about cookies another day. But that user ID is typically tied to your device. Now in some contexts, like if you're Netflix, you're always gonna know what somebody's email address is because they're logged in no matter what device they're on.
Speaker 2:So in that case, the user ID is slightly different because you have something that you can use across device. But in the case of ecom, you Nobody really logs into their account. If they do, you might have a Shopify, what do they call it? A customer ID. Yep.
Speaker 2:So you could potentially bring pieces together from one device to another, but that's not that's not common.
Speaker 1:Less than 1% of people are actually, quote unquote, logging in to their my account page within an ecom site. So, therefore, 99% plus are not logged in, so they we don't have and you don't have access to their customer ID within that browser even if they had previously purchased in most cases.
Speaker 2:Right. So it it's it just it doesn't make a lot of sense for for us to be relying on that. Maybe just to reiterate here, the user ID typically lives in a cookie, and we just discussed how important that user ID is when you pick up the phone and identify yourself. If your cookie cookies expire and if your user ID expires, you can understand the problem now. You're unidentified to the channel.
Speaker 2:So I think another day, we're gonna talk about cookies, but that's how cookies kinda come into this conversation. And cookies have expiries that are getting shorter and shorter. In Safari, in certain circumstances, they expire in as little as 24 hours. So when you do make those phone calls, you can make them for a day. But the following day, you make the phone call, and when they ask you your account ID, you basically have to say, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Can you generate me a new one? And then you lose the connection to your activity from yesterday. So I think that sort of sums it up. Did I we good? Did I miss anything?
Speaker 1:Nope. I think that that is good because it'll transition into our next slide here, which, for those watching, you'll see 2 different examples. On the left of the screen, if you are not watching this, there is a screenshot of the network panel. So if you just right click and or inspect, and it'll pull up the developer tools. And I'm just filtering by Facebook in the network filter and then clicking on one of the page view events.
Speaker 1:And then in the payload that's being sent to Facebook, I have the external ID that is circled. So in the world of Meta or Facebook, the external ID, the definition of external ID is something along the lines of a user ID that is associated in your system. So Meta wants you to send your user ID to them with that add to cart event like John mentioned. On the right is a view of cookies within this browser, and we in this example, we're looking at the underscore g a cookie. So this is most often, related to Google Analytics or Google Services, and the value here is gaone.2.
Speaker 1:And then, I think 15 or 16, numeric characters. And this is set within a in the context of a browser, as Sean mentioned. Now if a user just shuts down, if they're in Chrome and they shut down the browser and come back tomorrow or 2 days down the road in that same browser, most cases, this cookie value will be the same. However, if they are in a browser that has those limitations where they are enforcing a 24 hour or 7 day expiration, if you were to look at this value, it will be different. Even if it's same laptop and same Safari browser, Chrome browser, etcetera, it will be different.
Speaker 1:And therefore, you or that particular activity will be different to Meta or Google or TikTok, etcetera. So that brings us to number 2, which is how identification or user identification differ between channels. In general, each channel uses their own user ID. So there isn't a unless you force it, there isn't a universal ID where you create it, and that is the same user ID that you are sending to all of your marketing channels. Now with that said, most are using a combination of a user ID that you create, so, like, the Shopify customer ID or an alphanumeric user ID that you're creating you create and put in the external ID parameter for Facebook and TikTok, or you're using an email and phone number.
Speaker 1:And then the the I would say the third, the one that is is the most fragile is cookie values. So if we're just looking at a tracker that is setting a cookie and they're essentially using that as their identification, that cookie is going to be very fragile and and likely susceptible to the the user. You come back to the site and they don't know who you are. They're disconnected from your previous session. So even though everything is different, it usually falls user IDs within a channel usually fall within one of those 3 buckets.
Speaker 1:As I mentioned, some channels allow you to explicitly set your own user ID. So, the external ID is used in Meta and TikTok and others, but these platforms also use a triangulation system, which we talked about on one of our previous episodes with Event Match Quality, where Meta and TikTok and others are using. And their their way to help match and connect activity from your website to that user's activity in app through viewing or clicking ads, they want email and phone number and external ID and address information, name, etcetera. So then Meta and others have a better chance to try to connect that you or connect that user from site to app. So without getting into the nuances of all of the differences between each channel, usually those three buckets, it's either an alphanumeric I ID that you create and you send you explicitly send with each channel, with each event hit, and or it's an email phone number.
Speaker 1:So PII data, typically, they want that hashed, and or the third, which is gonna be cookie information, which could also be click IDs to connect activity to a user. So that's generally how they differ between channels. Some are explicit where you do it in your conversion API setup or your server track server side tracking setup with Elavar or someone else, or it's implicit and it's happening automatically through the script that the vendor has asked or the marketing channels asked you to place on-site. Did I miss anything on this one, John?
Speaker 2:No. I think that's perfect. Do you do you think it's worth going over the nuance of, like, the GA 4 user ID versus the client ID, or is that just too much? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Go for it.
Speaker 2:Okay. You you actually might have to help me here. But when we say user ID in the context of GA 4, what they're typically talking about is, like, a cross device ID. Right? Correct.
Speaker 2:And then there's another ID which is confusing, and it's called the client ID. Yep. And that client ID is the device ID. Correct. Correct?
Speaker 1:Correct.
Speaker 2:So GA 4 gives you the ability to link people across devices because if you have the same user ID across devices like an email address, then you can collect all their data together and understand it's the same person, but the client ID is made to be device specific. I just wanted to mention that because if people watching this are con or thinking about a GA 4 user ID, this is gonna be, like, very confusing. So yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a good point. The nomenclature can be very different, and and Shopify has the same setup where if you create an account or you place an order, even if you don't create an account, Shopify will give you a customer ID. So the customer ID, in this case, is similar to the GA for the Google user ID because it's at an account level. But then Shopify also has a session ID, which can be related to the client ID within Google. So very different terms, but they essentially do the same thing.
Speaker 1:It's to me, it's just a hierarchy. So with the in the context of user ID in this particular episode, we're really talking about the client ID and the session ID because that's what most solutions like in Elavar or competitors of Elavar, we are trying to extend the user ID or client ID or basically the the implicit or non logged in identification of a user. So, ultimately, platforms can perform better, which takes us to point number 3, which how extending a user ID can help. So, John, I think you described this in a very succinct manner. So how can extending this user ID that we're talking about, again, which is maybe a client ID or session ID, but as as a user comes back to the site multiple times over a week, month month plus period, how can extending the ability to recognize that user help?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we are limited by expiries. And in Safari, it's the most precarious. In Safari, like I said, it could be as little as a day where your your user ID expires. So that causes all sorts of problems, like lots of direct traffic in GA 4 or potentially in in other attribution tools, issues with just stitching sessions together.
Speaker 2:Well, one way to get get around that is to somehow extend the expiry of the cookie. So remember, just, I know there's a lot of stuff going on here. The cookie is storing your user ID. It's just a file system. It's just storing this account ID or user ID that we've been talking about.
Speaker 2:If we can extend the expiry, that means we can connect that user to their activity over a longer period of time. Remember the phone call example. We want them to be able to keep on telling us their account ID or user ID over and over. And if it expires, we're in a bad situation because we have to start from scratch. So one way in our case, one way we get around that is we use a server set cookie, and we'll skip the details there.
Speaker 2:But it extends that cookie from a day up to a year in Safari, and that has a really big impact on, well, the complexion of tools like GA 4.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. And just going back to point number 3 on the slide here is, ultimately or, you know, 23, the ability to recognize a user for a longer period of time, whether it's Meta, Google, TikTok, Klaviyo, anyone in between, it improves the accuracy or the data quality that each destination has of that particular user. So the phone call example is great. If someone picks up the phone and calls a week later and they say, hey.
Speaker 1:I just added to cart and started a checkout, They don't want like, you don't want to have to ask them what their account ID is or the user ID. They just wanna call and say, hey. I just just placed placed an order. That might be a little different. Just start at checkout.
Speaker 1:So they're ultimately user IDs are tied to most, if not all of their interactions on-site or the what the user is is taking part with online. And it just comes down to being able to either customize, personalize, or connect activity within a channel, which will impact either conversion rate on-site. So if you're you are using personalization tools and you want to personalize based on behavior from previous sessions, then that your personalization will increase conversion rate. I think we all we all can agree to that. Or it's connecting activity, whether it's, platform reporting, ROAS, better targeting, etcetera.
Speaker 1:It's also going to help improve the performance of your paid marketing channels. Did I miss anything on on this point?
Speaker 2:I don't think so. I don't think I can add anything to that. That was pretty pretty perfect.
Speaker 1:Alright. Well, that is three things to know about user IDs. I hope this was helpful. In a future episode, as John mentioned, we will be getting into more in-depth details on cookies and Xero first, second, third party data, etcetera. So that's it for this app.
Speaker 1:See you on the next.