Identifying visitors

Turn anonymous sessions into named people you recognise across the app.

By default, every visitor NudgeVisor records is anonymous. You still capture their full session from the very first page view, but you do not yet know who they are. As soon as you do know — usually right after someone logs in — you can tell NudgeVisor by calling NudgeVisor.identify(). This guide explains why and how. For the exact method signature and parameter table, see the identify() reference.

Why identify your visitors

Identifying someone tags their session replays, chats and live presence with a real name, email and any custom attributes you choose to pass along. Instead of a string of anonymous sessions, you get a meaningful person you can recognise across the whole app:

The live view shows who is on your site right now by name, not by a random visitor ID.
Session replays are labelled with the person who created them, so you can find a specific customer's sessions.
The inbox shows who you are talking to, with their email to hand.

Identify after login

The right moment to call identify() is once you know who someone is — typically immediately after they log in. The minimum is a single identifier: a database ID, email, or username. Use whatever is unique to that person in your own system.

NudgeVisor.identify('USER_ID');

You can also pass a second object of traits to attach a name, email and custom attributes in the same call:

NudgeVisor.identify('USER_ID', {
  name: 'Ada Lovelace',
  email: '[email protected]',
  plan: 'Premium',
});

What the name and email do

Two trait keys are treated specially:

name — shown as the visitor's display name throughout NudgeVisor.
email — shown beneath the name, and is searchable.

Every other trait you pass becomes a custom attribute stored on the visitor's profile. If you only supply an identifier, the display name falls back gracefully through name → email → userId → "Anonymous visitor", so a visitor identified by ID alone is still recognisable.

Anonymous activity is merged

You do not lose anything that happened before login. When you call identify(), the visitor's prior anonymous activity is merged onto the identified visitor — replays and chats recorded before they signed in are retained and relabelled under their real identity. The session that started as anonymous becomes one continuous story of that person.

Where identified visitors show up

Once identified, a visitor is meaningful everywhere in NudgeVisor: the live view, session replays and the inbox all refer to them by their display name and email. This makes it easy to follow a single customer across visits and to tie a support conversation back to what they were doing on the page.

Next steps

Read the identify() reference for the full method signature and parameter table.
Use setAttributes() to add or change custom attributes later without re-identifying.
Custom attributes power filtering — see attributes and segments to slice your visitors into meaningful groups.