Overview of Identities in SAS Customer Intelligence 360

About Identities

SAS Customer Intelligence 360 uses identity data to record customers’ interactions with your site and construct unique identity profiles. The data for identity profiles can come from multiple sources:

a channel in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 such as a website, email communication, or mobile app
imported data from an external database
streamed data from an on-premises system such as SAS Marketing Automation

This data is processed in real-time to create new identities and enhance existing identities with new data.

Creating identities for your customers enables you to get a clearer understanding of their behavior. Instead of using general advertising and email offers, you can target your communications based on their demographic data and contact preferences.

Note: You can also take advantage of personally identifiable information (PII) to personalize messages even further. When you use a transient table, you can customize a message with temporary PII data that is not stored in the system.

Definitions

identity

a piece of information that identifies a customer. One customer can be associated with multiple identity types. Identity types are associated with each other to form a comprehensive profile of a customer.

attribute

an optional data field that can be stored with an identity type. Attributes are customizable, business-specific information.

The identity service accepts identity attributes through a mapping request from an identity event. These attributes can be retrieved when you request an identity type from SAS Customer Intelligence 360.

identity event

an event in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 that generates data that can be used to create or modify a customer’s identity profile. For example, an identity event could be a customer entering their email address in a field or signing in to a website.

mapping

the process of associating identity types (for example, a visitor ID or a customer ID) with a datahub ID.

merging

combining two or more existing customers into one customer profile.

contextual information

Context is additional information that organizations pass about individuals to explain why someone is being contacted. For more information, see Contextual Information for Identities.

Identity Types

These identity types are managed by the identity service:

datahub ID (identity ID) is an identity that is created by the identity service. A customer is associated with only one primary datahub ID, and all customers represented in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 must have a datahub ID. Customers might have a secondary datahub ID that represents their usage when they were anonymous.
This ID bridges all identities together for a specific customer. The datahub ID is generated based on the browser cookie or looked up based on a mapped value. Any service that uses the identity service can pass any other identity for a customer and retrieve the customer’s datahub ID.
secondary datahub ID is a datahub ID that was initially assigned to a customer, but it is no longer the primary identifier.
For example, assume that a customer uses a new computer (or clears the cookies) and visits a site. The identity service does not recognize the customer and assigns the customer a datahub ID.

After the customer logs in, the identity service can recognize the customer’s profile, so the new ID that was created is merged to the existing, primary, datahub ID. If another service requests the customer profile based on the secondary ID, then the identity service returns the primary ID instead.

These types can be imported with customer data and are defined in the data descriptor:

customer ID is a value that is imported as a part of external customer data. For example, a customer ID might be an account number on your online store.
login ID is a value that customers use to login. This value is captured from real-time data sources or imported from external customer data.
subject ID is a subject identity, which is typically imported from SAS Marketing Automation. A customer is associated with only one subject ID.
By default subject IDs are not case sensitive, but you can contact SAS Technical Support to enable case sensitivity.
visitor ID is an identity that is mapped to a customer based on the customer’s visits to websites. A user is assigned a visitor ID when they visit your website.
If a datahub ID already exists for this visitor ID, then their browsing behavior is mapped to the datahub ID. Otherwise, the application generates a new datahub ID. As more data becomes available, existing visitor IDs and datahub IDs might be merged. A customer can be associated with zero to many visitor identities.
device ID is an identity that is mapped to a customer based on application usage from a mobile device. A customer can be associated with zero to many device identities.

Note: For all customer-specified identity types (login IDs, customer IDs and subject IDs), case sensitivity is disabled by default. You can ask SAS Technical Support to enable case sensitivity during onboarding to process these values differently based on capitalization.

This setting can be changed later by SAS Technical Support, but be aware that existing identity types might not work if they use mixed case. If you ask to update the property, update your customer data and contact preferences afterward to replace the existing values.

Contextual Information for Identities

Contextual information enables marketing organizations to associate individuals with a reason for why they are being contacted, such as belonging to a household or account. This information is passed along to events to help you understand the context for why individuals were contacted, and you can use that information to create or adjust contact policies.

For example, you select an individual primarily based on their membership in a household or for the specific bank account that they hold. In the segment, you provide the household or account identifier as context for their inclusion in the segment. When these individuals are used in a channel's task, the contextual information (membership in the household or ownership of a specific bank account) is passed along to the task's occurrences.

For more information about adding context, see Add Context to a Segment in SAS Customer Intelligence 360: User’s Guide.

After you add contextual information to a segment node, this data is passed to the associated audiences and downstream tasks. Context information is used by these task types:

On-premises bulk email tasks. The contextual information is collected in the Email detail tables.
Bulk custom tasks and triggered custom tasks. The contextual information is collected in the OUTBOUND_SYSTEM table.
Direct marketing tasks. The contextual information is collected in the DIRECT_CONTACT table.
Social media advertising tasks such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Snapchat Ads.
The contextual information is collected in the ADVERTISING_CONTACT table.
SMS tasks. The contextual information is collected in the SMS detail tables.
Bulk push notification tasks. The contextual information is collected in the Mobile detail tables.

In addition, when tasks trigger contact and response events, the contextual information is collected in the CONTACT_HISTORY table and the RESPONSE_HISTORY table. You can use this data to determine why a contact or response was made.

IMPORTANT Do not add personally identifiable information (PII) as contextual information, because the context values are stored in the Unified Data Model (UDM) tables. In the data tables, the contextual information is collected in the context_type_nm column and context_val column.

Last updated: August 11, 2026