Insider helps you configure the Identity Resolution Management (IRM) settings in the onboarding process.
After the onboarding process, when you need to change configured settings, corresponding assistance will be provided by Insider.
If an attribute in the IRM is added as an identifier, it is written to the profile only from the identity flow, which prevents the creation of duplicate users. If you make changes to the settings, the identity associations of existing users will not be affected.
Insider supports multiple identifiers for you to use. These identifiers can be Email, Phone number, or UUID as default ones, and/or any custom identifiers that you wish to use.
The Identity Resolution Management page displays the corresponding settings that shape your identification and unification flow, allowing you to configure and prioritize the identifiers for your users.
To start with, navigate to Components > Identity Resolution.
Identifier
Under Identifiers, the identifiers to be used are selected. The identifiers added here are the ones that can be considered in the identification requests. It will be ignored if an identifier is not added to this list, but is tried to be used in requests. For example, you set UUID as the only identifier on the Identity Resolution page and upload email addresses. Then, UUID acts as an identifier, while the email address remains as an attribute.
The attributes selected on the Identity Resolution page are used as identifiers. Otherwise, they remain as attributes and do not act as identifiers.
When selecting an identifier for user profiles, it’s crucial to avoid predictable patterns that could compromise data integrity or user privacy. For example, using sequential values such as 1, 2, 3, etc., as identifiers (even when applying formats like UUID) can make profiles more vulnerable to manipulation. Similarly, using client-side values like email (em) or phone number (pn) as external identifiers may expose the system to risk, as these values can potentially be guessed or altered. To reduce such risks, we recommend using a unique, non-guessable identifier as the external ID and treating values like em and pn as profile attributes instead. This ensures both reliable identity management and a safer user experience.
Value Limit
Limit represents the number of values assigned to a user profile per identifier type. Since it is valid for each identifier type, for example, while you can set a limit of 2 for the number of email identifiers, you can set it to 1 for the phone number identifier. In this case, the user can be associated with a maximum of two email addresses and one phone number.
Although the limit can be more than 1 in some businesses, we recommend setting the limit to 1 for most cases. If you update the identifiers of the profiles after they are created, Insider’s update user identifiers API and delete user identifiers API can be utilized to handle these changes.
Priority
Thanks to priority, you can define which identifier is more critical. When the result of the incoming identification request violates the value limit rules, priority settings will be applied, and the incoming request will be treated accordingly.
For example, the following limit and priority settings are configured;
Assume that Insider has the following profile in the database already
Profile with Insider ID 1
Email: john.doe@mail.com
UUID: xyz123
Then, Insider receives an identification request as follows;
Email: john.doe@mail.com
UUID: abc456
Because the same email address is used, if these incoming identifiers are attached to Profile ID 1, the profile will contain two uuid values and one email.
- As seen in the image, since the limit set for UUID is 1, this overrides the configured limit rule. In this case, Insider checks the priority of the incoming identifiers.
- Since uuid has a higher priority than email, Insider ignores email as an identifier on the identification request and searches for uuid in UCD. Since no existing profiles exist with this identifier, Insider creates a new user with UUID: abc456.
Assume that the given limits are the same, but priorities are vice versa as follows;
In this case, Insider ignores the UUID in the incoming payload and only searches for existing users by email identifier.
As a result, the Insider finds Profile ID 1 and recognizes the incoming request for the existing user.
You can also refer to the video below to better understand how priority and limit work:
Blocked Values
We highly recommend using blocked values to prevent unwanted merges caused by erroneous integrations, default value usage, or faulty deployments.
Since identifier values are unique, using the same value for all users, such as anonymous@mywebsite.com, as an email address value will result in faulty merging, and all your users will be considered one. To avoid this, add blocked values so that requests containing these values will be rejected.
We highly recommend that you check the hard-coded values added by your technical team and add them to the blocked values accordingly to prevent any unwanted merge cases.
You can always add/remove blocked values at any time. Contact the Insider One team.
Pause
The pause function temporarily stops the use of an identifier, so Insider ignores the paused identifier in identification requests. If you notice a malfunction in an identifier (such as sending the wrong data type) or no longer want to process it, pausing the identifier will prevent further unwanted occurrences. After fixing the issue, you might unpause the identifier for use in identification requests.
Limitations
You can add a maximum of 10 unique identifiers to the list.
The limit per identifier can be a maximum of 100.