Visitor Identification

To track site visitors, each visitor must have a unique visitor ID. Ideally, this is a persistent cookie with an extended expiration period (5 years or more.) Use the visitorID tag, the combination of IP address and userAgent, to submit visitor ID information to Adobe data collection servers. The visitorID variable supports up to 100 alpha-numeric characters and cannot contain a hyphen. If the data insertion includes a visitorID, the SiteCatalyst Data Processing Engine assumes that persistent cookies are enabled for the visitor's Web browser. If the data insertion identifies visitors using IP address/User Agent, SiteCatalyst displays persistent cookies for that visitor as disabled.

To avoid processing problems, make sure that visitorID is a uniformly distributed random number.

The visitorID is critical for linking a visitor's activities captured via JavaScript with those submitted through tagless data collection, or a third-party application. For example, to link a visitor's browsing activity with transactions in a third-party shopping cart application, you must pass the visitorID to the shopping cart application. The shopping cart application uses the visitorID when uploading transaction data via the Data Insertion API so SiteCatalyst can link the transaction data to the visitor's browsing activity (previously captured via JavaScript). Typically, the client systems generate unique visitor identifiers that you can use as the visitorID value. However, SiteCatalyst generates unique visitor IDs that you can use for this purpose, if necessary. You can get the SiteCatalyst-generated visitor ID by reading the s_vi cookie (for example, call $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE'] in PHP) for the visitor ID, then use that value as the <visitorid> element in the Data Insertion API call.

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