Anonymous and identified events · Docs

Every event belongs to someone, but not every event needs a full person profile. An identified event updates a person profile, with its properties and history. An anonymous event is recorded without one: it still counts in your charts, but it carries no person properties.

How the snippet decides

The snippet starts the library with person_profiles: 'identified_only'. With this setting, a visitor's events are anonymous until any of these happens:

you call myjourney.identify(...);
you set person properties with setPersonProperties or unsetPersonProperties;
you call myjourney.alias(...);
you call myjourney.createPersonProfile().

From then on, every event from that browser is identified, including on later visits, until myjourney.reset() starts a new anonymous visitor.

Anonymous events are stored with the property $process_person_profile set to false, so you can filter for them.

What anonymous events can do

Count in trends, funnels, retention, paths and web analytics, including unique visitor counts.
Carry event properties, such as the page, browser and campaign, for filters and breakdowns.
Join the visitor's sessions and recordings.
Become part of the person's history once the visitor is identified: their earlier anonymous events are linked to the person.

What needs identified events

Person properties in filters, breakdowns and cohorts.
A profile you can open under Activity → Persons.
Joining one person's activity across devices.

Choose a setting

`person_profiles`	Use it when
`'identified_only'` (the snippet's default)	Most visitors never sign in, and you want person profiles for the ones who do.
`'always'`	You want a person profile, with person properties, for every visitor, including anonymous ones.
`'never'`	You never need person profiles. Calls such as `identify` are ignored.

To change it, edit the option in the snippet's myjourney.init call.

Create a profile for an anonymous visitor

To give a visitor a profile without knowing who they are, for example when they start a checkout:

myjourney.createPersonProfile();

Server-side events

Events you send from your server decide this themselves. To send an anonymous event, set $process_person_profile to false in its properties. Any person properties sent with such an event ($set, $set_once) are removed. Events that only make sense for a person, such as $identify, $create_alias and $groupidentify, are discarded if they arrive with $process_person_profile: false, and appear in Event ingestion warnings.

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