Insider One uses identifiers and their values to identify and unify user data. For example, if the email address is your business's identifier and a user visits your website and leaves their email address, a user profile is created with it. When you provide the relevant identifiers, such as email addresses, Insider One can use them to differentiate users from other profiles across platforms. As long as the user logs in to your website with the registered email address, they are counted as the same user.
Users often browse anonymously and identify themselves later, for example by logging in at checkout. When they do, Insider One merges the anonymous browsing data into the known profile, preserving the earlier events and attributes in the unified record. If a single device is used by several people and identifiers are not properly limited and prioritized, distinct users can be merged into a single profile. The Priority, Value Limit, and Blocked Values settings exist to prevent this.
You can also refer to the video below to better understand identifiers and how they help:
User profiles are managed in three ways upon receiving an identification request:
Create a new user profile
If Insider One cannot find an existing user profile for the identifiers in the request, a new user profile will be created and a profile ID assigned to the user.
For example, the user visits your website on a desktop and registers with their email address for the first time. Then, Insider One will create a user profile ID for them, including the data stored when they were anonymous, and associate it with their email address, regardless of the platform.
Add to an existing user profile
If Insider One finds an existing user profile that matches the identifiers, the incoming request will attempt to be associated with it. If the final user profile overrides the identity management rules, the limit and priority configurations will be applied accordingly.
For example, the user registers on your website on a desktop and later visits it on a mobile. Since they already have a profile ID, the data will be inserted into the same profile ID.
Merge existing profiles
Insider One allows you to use multiple identifiers for a user. If Insider One finds multiple existing profiles associated with the incoming identification request, it will attempt to merge them based on the configured limits and priorities.
For example, you use an email address and a phone number as identifiers, and you might not receive both at the same time. You collect the user’s email address on your website and their phone number in your brick-and-mortar store and share this offline information with Insider One, too. Two user profiles are created for that user: one associated with the email address and the other with the phone number. Then, the user visits your website and leaves their phone number on their account. In this case, the identity request, including both the email address and phone number, is received. Even though there are two different profiles on Insider One that share the same identifiers, they are merged.
Set up your identifiers carefully before go-live, because identification and merges cannot be undone. Once an identifier is tied to a profile's insider_id, it stays tied, and once two profiles are merged, they become one profile and cannot be split back into separate users. The Priority, Value Limit, and Blocked Values settings are what prevent unintended merges, so they are worth getting right up front.
If you need to correct identifier values on a profile later, use the Update Identifiers and Delete Identifiers APIs. These edit the identifiers on a profile. They do not reverse a merge.
How matching works
Insider One uses a deterministic matching engine that unifies users based on matching identifier values and your configured identifier priorities; no statistical or probabilistic matching is applied. It means two records are merged only when they share a value on an identifier you have configured. You control the behavior with two settings per identifier:
Priority: A strict hierarchy that decides which identifier is checked first (for example, UUID > email > phone number). Higher-priority identifiers govern the merge decision.
Value limit: How many values of that identifier type a single profile may hold (for example, up to 2 emails but only 1 phone number). For most businesses, a limit of 1 is recommended.
Example: if the phone number is priority 1 and a new sign-up arrives with a different phone number but the same email as an existing profile, the profiles are not merged because the top-priority identifier does not match. If the email limit is 1, that email is stored on the new profile as an attribute rather than a second identifier, so you may see the same email on two profiles without them being merged.
You can also refer to the video below to better understand how a profile is created, updated, and merged:
The video below further illustrates the user journey with practical, real-life examples: