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This guide introduces you to the concept of identity graphs in Profiles and shows how to use them in your Profiles project.

Overview

Multiple identities is the biggest obstacle to getting a full picture of your customers, user, or any other entity.

Companies gather user data across digital touchpoints like websites, mobile apps, enterprise systems like CRMs, marketing platforms, etc. During this process, a single user is identified with multiple identifiers across your systems, like email address, phone number, device ID, anonymous ID, user name, etc. To create a unified user profile, it is vital to collect and stitch all of those different identifiers into one canonical identifier.

You can leverage Profiles’ id_stitcher model to take your inputs and stitch all the identifiers together into an identity graph.

Requirements

• Defined id_types for your entity and mapped to your input sources.

Usage

The identity graph is located in the profiles.yaml file as an id_stitcher model.

models:
  - name: user_id_stitcher
    model_type: id_stitcher
    model_spec:
      entity_key: user
      edge_sources:
        - from: inputs/rsIdentifies
        - from: inputs/rsPages

Best practices

• For the identity_stitcher model, use only the id_types and inputs necessary to stitch the identifiers relevant to an entity. For example, if you don’t care about anonymous traffic, do not add anonymous_id as an id_type or any inputs related to anonymous traffic.
• Conceptually, you can think of your identity_graph table as a kind of fact table in star or Snowflake schema. All of your core identifiers are in the center table and are used to connect to your inputs.
• Only include inputs as edge sources that include id_types directly related to the entity (the first level out from the fact table in a Snowflake schema). For example, you may need to include an id_type for product names because they are in a separate table but you do not want to include them in the identity_graph.