Identifiers and identity resolution is at the core of what Hull customer data platform does. To “join the dots” about the same person or company with data from multiple different sources, there needs to be a unique identifier to associate other data with.
Hull supports identifiers for Users (people) and Accounts (companies).
Identifiers have an order of priority. This is used to ensure safe merging of Users & Accounts:
external_id
— “bring your own ID” to set identities from another system (like your backend database)email
or domain
— for unifying data around the same contact detailsanonymous_id
— for capturing session cookies and third party identifiers (like your Salesforce ID)All incoming data must include at least one identifier to be ingested. Hull will lookup and match with existing User & Account profiles.
User merged
event stamped on their profile.external_id
set, then one Account will be merged into the otherThis process is called identity resolution.
User Identifiers in order of priority include:
external_id
email
anonymous_id
User identity resolution works as follows with all new incoming data:
external_id
. If not, skip to the next step. If present, see if there is a matching external_id in the index. If a match is found, then merge the incoming data with that User. If no match is found and no other identifier is present, then create a new User — otherwise continue to the next step.email
. If not, skip to the next step. If present, see if there is a matching email in the index. If a match is found, then merge the incoming data with that User. If no match is found and no other identifier is present, then create a new User — otherwise continue to the next step.anonymous_id
. If present, see if there is a matching anonymous_id in the index. If a match is found, then merge the incoming data with that User. If no match is found, then continue to the next step.Learn more about Hull’s User identity resolution strategy.
Account identifiers in order of priority include:
external_id
domain
Account identity resolution works as follows with all new incoming data:
external_id
. If not, skip to the next step. If present, see if there is a matching external_id in the index. If a match is found, then merge the incoming data with that Account. If no match is found and no other identifier is present, then create a new Account — otherwise continue to the next step.domain
that is not a free email address domain. If not, skip to the next step. If present, see if there is a matching domain in the index. If a match is found, then merge the incoming data with that Account. If no match is found, then continue to the next step.Learn more about Hull’s Account identity resolution strategy.