One of the benefits of Clarity is being able to dial in the interface to fit your needs when it comes to analytics, reporting and visualizations. We are excited to highlight the “Custom user ID” feature which enhances Clarity’s capabilities even further.
You might be familiar with the “Clarity user ID,” a generic user ID assigned to each visitor when they come to your site. This ID gets assigned to features like screen recordings and it is possible to filter by, however it isn’t consistent across browsers and devices.
Custom user IDs on the other hand can help you stitch together your users’ sessions across devices, browsers, and more! For example, if a user visits your site through mobile and desktop, or even two different browsers, you’ll be able to see their journey across all on the visitor profile. Visitor profiles shown below, provide a detailed and organized display of information about your users, all in one place. Learn more about visitor profiles here.
Using a custom identifier can help you view more unified and complete user journeys when performing a user-level-based analysis and is useful for debugging, investigating patterns, and examining data based on specific customers.
Custom identifiers are nothing but informational data values about site visitors that are sent to Clarity by your client-side code over its Identify API. Custom user ID is just one of those identifiers and is configurable under the custom-id key-value pair. Other custom identifiers include custom-session-id and custom-page-id. Learn more about custom identifies and our API visit here.
All values provided and transmitted over the Identify API get securely hashed on the client before being sent to Clarity servers. For example, you could decide to send across a user’s email address or their respective customer loyalty ID as a custom-id and Clarity would ensure that this information remains protected and confidential. For an optimal use of custom-id, the Identify API should be called for each page of the website even if you choose not to pass other identifiers, such as custom-session-id or custom-page-id.
Tip: Use unique custom user IDs for authenticated users. Sending static strings for all authenticated users is undesired and makes custom user IDs useless. For unauthenticated users, either don’t use the API or set the ID to ‘unknown,’ ‘not logged in,’ or ‘0.
Below you can see the filter fields which will allow you to filter by custom IDs. You can also learn more about filters here or watch our YouTube video here.
We hope this feature highlight will allow you to better track and interpret your customer data. As always if you have any feedback please reach out to us at [email protected]!
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