Changing the contact identification method in Web Extend – Emarsys

You can find the most important pieces of information about changing the method of contact identification in Web Extend in this article.

If you need to disable or change the identifier, please raise a support ticket to Emarsys Support, as some backend configuration change is required.

Important: Before changing the way contacts are identified in Web Extend, consider the following:

If you change the identification method and the link tracking parameters are updated accordingly, then your Web Channel audiences will be empty and the contacts who had previously entered your Web Channel Automation Center program will not be able to see your campaigns anymore.
Changing the contact identification method in Web Extend may break your Smart Insight integration if Smart Insight receives sales data via the Web Extend data collection scripts. To avoid breaking your Smart Insight integration, after changing the contact identification method in Web Extend you need to modify your Smart Insight settings as described in Selecting contact fields for filtering.

What to do when changing the contact identification method

When you change the contact identification method, please keep in mind that you also need to:

Change the JavaScript snippet on your website and
Update your existing Email Recommender widgets.

After changing the identification method, you need to:

Deactivate your Segment and Automation-based Web Channel campaigns and then activate them again (otherwise campaigns will not be able to resolve contacts).

For example, if you change the contact identification from setCustomerId to setEmail, then you also need to replace the setCustomerId commands with setEmail in your implementation.

If you change the identification method to setCustomerId and the link tracking parameter sc_customer is replaced with sc_eh or the other way around, then links created prior to this change will not work properly even though error messages will not appear in the live events. As a result, contacts will not be properly identified. This means that the links you created before changing the method of contact identification will not contain any value based on which Web Extend could identify your customers. In this case, you can still use browser cookies or explicit identification instead. Please note that this has a short-term and very low impact on your campaigns (i.e. campaigns containing link tracking and recommendations that were created before changing the identification method will not identify contacts properly, the links and recommendations will be generic).

What happens after changing the contact identification method

Changing the contact identification method affects recommendations as follows:

Recommendations using the PERSONAL logic are rebuilt after the change, this means that these recommendations may be more general for a couple of days.
Recommendations using various types of logic that show related products (e.g. POPULAR, ALSO_BOUGHT, CATEGORY, etc.) remain unchanged and are not rebuilt.
The predict Web behavior fields remain unchanged. These fields will not be deleted and they are updated the same way as before changing the method of identification.

After changing the method of identification, Predict Email Recommender widgets will not work in email campaigns created previously because they will refer to the previously used identification field. To avoid this issue, make sure that Email Recommender widgets used prior to the change are not used in: