Spec: Identify

The Innkeepr Identify call lets you tie a user to their actions and record traits about them. It includes a unique User ID and any optional traits you know about the user, like their email, name, and more. We recommend that you make an Identify call:

After a user first registers
After a user logs in
When a user updates their info (for example, they change or add a new address)
Upon loading any pages that are accessible by a logged in user (optional)

The first three examples are pretty self-explanatory, but many might ask: why you would call identify on every page load if we’re storing the userId in the cookie/local storage? Let’s imagine this scenario: I log into your app. Identify is called. For whatever reason, I close the browser and don’t return until later. There’s no way of knowing where I will reenter your app from. I could start my session from anywhere. And because there are many tools out there that require an initial identify call for certain features (e.g. Intercom chat widget) it’s important to tell your end tools who the user is when they first start their session. Calling identify is one of the first steps to getting started with Innkeepr. Refer to library-specific documentation for more details. Here’s the payload of a typical identify call:

{
  "type": "identify",
  "traits": {
    "name": "Peter Gibbons",
    "email": "peter@example.com",
    "plan": "premium",
    "logins": 5
  },
  "userId": "97980cfea0067"
}

And here’s the corresponding JavaScript event that would generate the above payload:

Innkeepr.identify("97980cfea0067", {
  name: "Peter Gibbons",
  email: "peter@example.com",
  plan: "premium",
  logins: 5
});

Beyond common fields, an identify call has the following fields:

Identify Call

FIELD	TEXT	TYPE	DESCRIPTION
traits	optional	Object	Free-form dictionary of traits of the user, like email or name. See the Traits field docs for a list of reserved trait names.
userId	required; optional if anonymousID is set instead	String	Unique identifier for the user in your database. A userId or an anonymousId is required. See the Identities docs for more details.

Example

Here’s a complete example of an identify call:

{
  "anonymousId": "507f191e810c19729de860ea",
  "context": {
    "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5)"
  },
  "messageId": "022bb90c-bbac-11e4-8dfc-aa07a5b093db",
  "timestamp": "2015-02-23T22:28:55.111Z",
  "traits": {
    "name": "Peter Gibbons",
    "email": "peter@example.com",
    "plan": "premium",
    "logins": 5,
    "address": {
      "street": "6th St",
      "city": "San Francisco",
      "state": "CA",
      "postalCode": "94103",
      "country": "USA"
    }
  },
  "type": "identify",
  "userId": "97980cfea0067",
  "version": "1.1"
}

Identities

The identify call specifies a visitor identity that you can reference across the visitor’s whole lifetime. **Every identify call must have a User ID or an Anonymous ID, depending on how much you know about the visitor in question.

Anonymous ID

There are certain cases where you don’t actually know who the visitor is according to your database, but you still want to be able to tie them to traits, events, or page views. For example, you may not know who a user is when tracking newsletter signups or anonymous page views. In these cases, you should use an Anonymous ID. The Anonymous ID can be any pseudo-unique identifier. For example, on your servers you can use a session id. If you don’t have any readily available identifier, you can always generate a new random one - we recommend UUIDs. Note: Innkeepr’s libraries automatically use Anonymous IDs to keep track of users as they navigate around your website or app, so you don’t need to worry about them when using those libraries. Here’s an example of a JavaScript event for an anonymous user:

Innkeepr.identify({
  subscriptionStatus: 'inactive'
});

User ID

User IDs are a more permanent and robust identifier, like a database ID. Since these IDs are consistent across a customer’s lifetime, identify calls should include a User ID as often as possible. A User ID is usually the unique identifier that you recognize a user by in your own database. For example, if you’re using MongoDB it might look something like 507f191e810c19729de860ea. We recommend using database IDs instead of simple email addresses or usernames, because database IDs never change. That guarantees that even if the user changes their email address, you can still recognize them as the same person in all of your analytics tools. And even better, you’ll be able to correlate analytics data with your own internal database. Instead of using an email address or a username as a User ID, send them along as traits.

Traits

Traits are pieces of information you know about a user that are included in an identify call. These could be demographics like age or gender, account-specific like plan, or even things like whether a user has seen a particular A/B test variation. Up to you! Innkeepr has reserved some traits that have semantic meanings for users, and we handle them in special ways. For example, we always expect email to be a string of the user’s email address. We’ll send this on to destinations like Klaviyo that require an email address to build targeting lists. You should only use reserved traits for their intended meaning. Reserved traits at Innkeepr:

TRAIT	TYPE	DESCRIPTION
`address`	Object	Street address of a user optionally containing: city, country, postalCode, state, or street
`age`	Number	Age of a user
`avatar`	String	URL to an avatar image for the user
`birthday`	Date	User’s birthday
`company`	Object	Company the user represents, optionally containing: name (String), id (String or Number), industry (String), employee_count (Number) or plan (String)
`createdAt`	Date	Date the user’s account was first created. We recommend using ISO-8601 date strings.
`description`	String	Description of the user
`email`	String	Email address of a user
`email_sha256`	String	The email of a user hashed with SHA256.
`firstName`	String	First name of a user
`gender`	String	Gender of a user
`id`	String	Unique ID in your database for a user
`lastName`	String	Last name of a user
`name`	String	Full name of a user. If you only pass a first and last name we automatically fill in the full name for you.
`phone`	String	Full name of a user. If you only pass a first and last name we automatically fill in the full name for you.
`title`	String	Title of a user, usually related to their position at a specific company. Example: “VP of Engineering”
`username`	String	User’s username. This should be unique to each user, like the usernames of Twitter or GitHub.
`website`	String	Website of a user

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Identify Call

Example

Identities

Anonymous ID

User ID

Traits

​Identify Call

​Example

​Identities

​Anonymous ID

​User ID

​Traits

Identify Call

Example

Identities

Anonymous ID

User ID

Traits