Unknown User Activation Overview

It's a familiar scenario: a user comes to your site for the first time, clicks into multiple pages for big-ticket items, but doesn't make a purchase. They provide no identifiable information that would allow you to reach out to them. After their session ends, they're effectively lost.

What if, instead of losing this user, you could send them an in-app or embedded message during their next visit, offering a 10% discount on the previously viewed items? And, what if configuring this functionality was as simple as defining profile creation criteria in Iterable's UI, without developer intervention (other than initial SDK setup)?

With Unknown User Activation, all of this is possible.

# In this article

# What is Unknown User Activation?

Unknown User Activation allows marketers to:

• Collect data about unidentified visitors. With user consent, Iterable's SDKs can save user profile and event data about unidentified visitors on-device (for mobile apps) and in-browser (for websites).

• Create unknown user profiles for the most valuable users. Define profile creation criteria that aligns with your business goals so that Iterable creates profiles only for unidentified visitors who you expect will add value to your business (you can update criteria anytime without redeploying or re-releasing your apps or website).

• Send personalized messages to unknown users. Once Iterable creates an unknown user profile in Iterable (and replays locally stored data to it), you can send in-app messages, embedded messages, and push notifications (for mobile apps) to users who were previously unreachable.

• Convert unknown users into known users. When you learn the identity of an unknown user, you can assign it to their unknown user profile.

• Consolidate user profiles. Unknown User Activation can help you consolidate profiles in your Iterable project by merging unknown user profiles with existing, known user profiles.

# Types of users

For Unknown User Activation, it's important to understand the types of users who can interact with your mobile apps and websites, and how one type of user becomes another type of user.

# Visitors

Visitors are unidentified users who don't have user profiles in Iterable.

For these users, when consent has been granted and Unknown User Activation is enabled, Iterable's SDKs can save user data (such as user profile updates, custom events, cart update events, and purchase events) locally, on-device or in-browser.

# Unknown users

Unknown users are unidentified visitors who now have user profiles in your Iterable project. These users started as visitors, but met your profile creation criteria, so Iterable created temporary, unknown profiles for them. Their data is now saved directly to Iterable, not stored locally. This includes data that was previously stored locally when they were a visitor.

When creating an unknown user profile, Iterable's SDKs assign a temporary userId (a UUID like 2411ce94-52df-47aa-98bc-7293ac951121), as follows:

• For all project types, Iterable uses this SDK-provided userId as the unknown user's ID.

• For email-based projects, Iterable also assigns a placeholder email address that's based on the user ID but not identical to it. For example, the placeholder email for the userId above would be similar to:
  2411ce94-52df-47aa-98bc-7293ac951121+-1092240346@placeholder.email

  See Automatically Assigning a Placeholder Email for details on how a placeholder email is assigned.

# Known users

Known users are identified by actual (non-placeholder) userId or email values and have user profiles in Iterable. When you identify an unknown user (by providing their actual userId or email), Iterable either:

• Converts the unknown profile to a known profile if one doesn't already exist in Iterable, or
• Merges the unknown user profile into an existing known profile, along with all associated data.

After merging, the unknown profile is deleted. You can create known user profiles directly (by calling Iterable's API or importing them) or they can be created when you provide an email or userId for an unknown user.

# Unknown User Activation workflow

Here's an overview of the steps to setting up and using Unknown User Activation.

1. Enable Iterable's SDKs. First, have your engineers update your apps and websites to use versions of Iterable's iOS, Android, and Web SDKs that support Unknown User Activation. They also need to address user consent for data collection.
   For details, refer to the Unknown User Activation Developer Docs.

2. Define profile creation criteria. Your marketers define criteria in your Iterable project to specify when Iterable's SDKs should create unknown user profiles in Iterable for unidentified visitors to your app or website.
   For example, you might define criteria to create unknown user profiles only for users who complete certain tasks, or about whom you know specific information. By specifying meaningful profile creation criteria, you can create user profiles only for those users who align with your business goals, and avoid creating profiles for those who don't.

3. Capture user data. When a visitor (an unidentified user without a user profile in Iterable) performs a triggering event during a visit to your app or website, Iterable's SDKs automatically capture user profile updates, cart update events, purchase events, custom events, and other data associated with their visit. This data is stored in browser or device local storage, not in Iterable.

4. Create unknown user profiles (and IDs) in Iterable. When your app or website has collected data about an unidentified user that satisfies any of the profile creation criteria your marketing team has defined, the SDKs create an unknown user profile and an associated ID for that user in Iterable. The unknown user ID is automatically assigned — you can't select a custom identifier or assign one from a CDP.

5. Convert unknown users to known users. Upon learning the identity of an unknown user (their actual userId or email), Iterable's SDKs can assign that identity to the unknown user profile you've already created in Iterable — or the user's unknown user profile (and all its data) can be merged into an existing, known user profile if the user already has one.

# Next steps

Learn what you need to know before using Unknown User Activation.