Anonymous activity

Track page views, screen views, and custom events from people you haven't identified yet so their activity is ready to use as soon as you identify them.

How it works

Anonymous activities are actions people take on your website or app before logging in or identifying themselves. These people are often leads or prospects. When you identify anonymous users, Customer.io merges their anonymous activity into a profile.

flowchart LR a(Person visits website) a-->b{Are they already identified?} b-....->|Yes|c(Activity isn't anonymous) b-->|No|d(Activity is anonymous) d-->e subgraph e[Anonymous activity] direction LR f(Person visits page) g(Person adds item to cart) h(Person starts video) end e-->i{Is person identified within 30 days?} i-->|Yes, anonymous activity associated with profile|c i-.->|No|j(Anonymous activity is deleted)

You can track anonymous users’ activity, like the pages they visit and the actions they take, but you’re limited in how you can message them until you identify them. You can identify profiles when they provide an id like an email addresses through a web form, create an account with you, or log into your service.

We retain anonymous events for up to 30 days. If you haven’t identified the person after 30 days, we delete the activity.

Track & store anonymous data

You can track anonymous activity on your website or app and store it in Customer.io.

Our JavaScript libraries and mobile SDKs automatically assign profiles an anonymous ID and track page or screen views.

Our server-side libraries and APIs don’t automatically track anonymous activities. If you want to track anonymous data with these libraries, you’ll need to assign an anonymous ID to profiles and send events manually.

You can also track custom events, like adding items to a cart, as anonymous activities, but you’ll need to manually set up this tracking for each of the methods above. After you track them, your workspace automatically merges them into identified profiles like page and screen views.

You can forward anonymous activities from Customer.io to analytics platforms or data warehouses to track traffic and other metrics, even before you identify the people generating them.

Message anonymous users

If you’re on a premium or enterprise plan, you can send in-app messages to anonymous users. Any other messaging requires you identify them first.

Message identified profiles based on anonymous activity

After an anonymous event merges into an identified profile, the event can trigger an automation if it happened within the past 72 hours.

However, you can trigger automations based on older anonymous activities through segments. If the event happened more than 72 hours ago and your segment includes the event as a condition, people join the segment, which can trigger automations.

Review merged activity

You might review merged anonymous activity to check why someone triggered an automation. Keep in mind, anonymous activities performed within 72 hours of the profile becoming identified can trigger workflows.

You can find this information in the Profile activity page:

Click Anonymous to view a running list of anonymous activities. When events merge with a profile, they move to Identified.
From Identified, you can filter by Anonymous Data Merged to locate previously anonymous activities that merged into identified profiles. This activity records the number of anonymous events merged, the unix timestamp for the oldest event, and the anonymous ID associated with the user.

You can also filter for this data from a profile’s Activity tab.

Disable merging anonymous activities into identified profiles

Customer.io automatically merges the past 30 days of anonymous activity into identified profiles. We recommend leaving anonymous event merging on. If you turn it off, then identified profiles won’t inherit the activities which influences which automations are triggered, segments they join, and more.

If you want to disable auto merge, follow these steps:

Go to Settings > Workspace Settings and click Merge Options.
Turn off the Anonymous event merge setting.
Set up an integration that sends events to Customer.io. Our JavaScript snippet makes this easy.