Who Should Choose this Strategy?
The Customer Distinction strategy is useful for brands that meet the following criteria:
- A brand with different consent and privacy requirements for anonymous versus logged-in users
- A brand that is in an industry, which does not enforce a Single ID > Account (for example, the same email can be used to create multiple accounts)
- A customer with rich first-party customer data
- A customer who has scenarios to create highly accurate customer profiles like sending a personalised email
Pros
- Ability to configure your own strategy as per your business need or use case
- No dilution of quality – There is noise reduction in the profile signals received
- Granularity in the configuration that gives you better profile merge control
- Attribution and feedback loop – Any marketing strategies and corresponding user actions can be linked to the exact customer
Cons
- Data preparation – For data collection methods like file transfers, the onus is on the client to ensure that the Primary IDs are properly filled.
- Depending on the configuration, there can be more than one customer profile per user.
ID Classification
The data that you, as a brand share with Zeotap, is coupled with relevant identifiers that can be of low or high fidelity. Based on your business need and use case, you can define how the customer profiles are created in Zeotap.
Zeotap’s Classification feature gives you first-level control, using which you can classify the IDs as high fidelity, low fidelity and disable the ones that you would not like to be used for the ID resolution and unification process.
Primary IDs (high fidelity)
These are identifiers that uniquely identify a user in your organisation. We recommend that you pick an immutable and persistent identifier as your Primary ID. When a Primary ID is present in an incoming record, then the system only uses that for ID resolution and unification. The system looks up whether a profile already exists for a given ID or a new UCID must be created.
Secondary IDs (low fidelity)
The identifiers classified as Secondary, are used for profile creation or resolution only in the absence of Primary identifiers.
Note that these identifiers never result in the unification of an incoming record with any Primary identifier-based profile. Thus, maintaining the authenticity of the Primary profiles.
Disabled IDs
These IDs are ingested as identifiers, but they do not participate in profile resolution.
However, if any source is sending records containing only Disabled IDs, then the system does not ingest such records. This is because the record is disabled and hence cannot be used for ID resolution or unification.Last modified on February 26, 2026
