Customer data¶
The Customer Data Service (CDS) collects and unifies data about your end users across every interaction with your applications. It gives each user a single profile that represents who they are and what they have done across your applications.
Note
Customer Data Service is currently in Preview. You need to enable it from Feature Preview before the Customer Data section appears in the console. See Enable Customer Data Service.
What you can do with it¶
- Capture anonymous activity: Capture what a visitor favorites, submits, or browses, before they ever create an account or sign in.
- Keep the data when they sign up: CDS merges the anonymous profile into the user's permanent one at sign in, so activity from before the account existed gets carried over.
- Unify a person across devices and applications: Bring user data together into a single profile, linked by the
user_idafter sign-in or by a matching identifier, such as an email address, before sign-in. - Control what a profile holds and how it merges: Define profile attributes, data types, and merge rules, including whether values accumulate over time or are replaced by the most recent value.
Where to start¶
| Read | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Enable Customer Data Service | Turn the feature on from Feature Preview. |
| Profiles | The shape of a profile and how anonymous and permanent profiles relate. |
| Profile attributes | Attribute types, mutability, and merge strategies. |
| Unification rules | When two records get merged into one. |
| Use cases | Common integration patterns for unifying activity across sessions, devices, and applications. |