Selecting Profile Unification in Raptor Control Panel's menu will take you to the Profile Unification tool. Here, you can create person identifiers. Person identifiers form the Profile Unification of your CDP and are crucial for stitching your data together correctly. For a more in-depth explanation on the purpose and general idea of Profile Unification, see Introduction to Person Identifiers and Profile Unification.
Person Identifier Overview
This is where you land when you arrive. It shows a full list of all Person Identifiers you have added to the Profile Unification so far. Various information will be listed for each - notably, for any Person Identifier using the Generic type, you will be able to mouse over 'i' mark in the Rules-column to see what the set Rules for that ID is. You can also see the number of profiles in the CDP containing the specific identifier.
When a Person Identifier is created it can only be deactivated until the identifier is used in an activated dataflow. Click the "Deactivate"-button to do so. The status of the identifier will be set to "Inactive", and it will be moved to the bottom of the overview. The name of a deactivated identifier cannot be reused by a new instance. There are no options to edit or delete existing Person Identifiers. The Profile Unification created from these Person Identifiers is extremely fundamental to Raptor's systems, so removing an established Person Identifier can cause a wide variety of issues, glitches, and general breakages in the system. If a mistake has been made when adding a Person Identifier, you will need to contact Raptor Support to see if it is possible to remove the issue without serious repercussions. With that in mind, please make sure that you act with care in the next section, and double-check all entries.
Creating New Person Identifiers
Hitting the "Create new Person Identifier"-button from the overview will take you to the creation view. Here, you enter the name of the ID (only alphanumeric characters Aa-Zz and 0-9 are allowed, no spaces), select the data type, and whether or not it is a unique ID. Select No if a profile can be identified by more than one identifier. Example: you might allow a profile to have multiple phone numbers. Select Yes if a profile can only be identified by one identifier. Example: A profile should be uniquely identified by a customer ID of your CRM system.
For the ID types Email Address, Phone Number and GUID (used for cookieIDs) there is nothing else that needs to be done. Validation will be carried out automatically by the system.
Email Addresses are validated by general validation rules (only letters (a-z), numbers, underscores, periods, and dashes are allowed, must contain a registered domain, must contain one @ and a . (dot)).
Phone Numbers follow the E164 format and expect a country code (e.g. +45) and will fail if none provided. Validation of the phone numbers is country-specific, meaning if a phone number is ingested with a +45 as the country code, only an eight digit number is accepted as a valid number. Dashes "-" and parentheses "(" and ")" are not allowed. The Data Manager holds features that will help you correct ingested data that needs to apply to the phone number validation criteria (insert a default country code if none is provided, or combine two fields if country code and phone number are separated into two fields).
Using the Phone Number type for validating your phone numbers will ensure that you can use them in your activations towards e.g. Google and Meta as they expect E164 formatting.
For GUIDs any standard following the structure xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx is accepted.
Simply hit Done, and the ID will be added to your Profile Unification.
Setting Rules for Generic IDs
Once you select the Generic data type, several new options will appear. The first of these is a toggle that will let you select whether the inputs are case sensitive - that is, whether the system should distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters. By selecting No, all letters will be lowercased.
Beneath, you have six lines that let you configure the input-rules.
- Minimum number of characters - entries beneath this length are rejected. Checked by default, uncheck to remove lower bound.
- Maximum number of characters - entries above this length are rejected. Checked by default, uncheck to remove upper bound.
- Allow special characters - check this to allow specific characters outside of letters and numbers. These must be entered as a comma-separated list with no spaces. Note that most 'regional' letters, such as æ, ö and ß are considered special characters.
- Numbers are allowed - if this is checked, any entry that includes the numbers 0-9 will be accepted.
- Letters are allowed - if this is checked, any entry that includes the letters a-z will be accepted. This includes uppercase letters too, if the Case sensitive toggle is set.
- Spaces are allowed - if this is checked, any entry that includes a space is accepted. Can be useful for preventing whitespace errors (leave unchecked in that case).
However, there is an additional, alternative option. If you select the "Advanced rules"-button above the six lines, they will be replaced with a single line, which accepts any Regex expression. If you know your Regex, you can setup your own validation. When using the regex option, you will overwrite the general rules.
🔍 Note: Keep validation tight! It is crucial that flawed data ingested by accident is kept out of the Profile Unification.
Validate your Rules
Considering that, as stated above, a Person Identifier cannot generally be edited or deleted once created, this final step is crucial. A validator is provided, where you can copy-paste some relevant entries into, or type them out yourself. Hit the Validate button to test these entries against the rules you have set. Those that are accepted are marked with green, those that are rejected are marked in red. Use this to ensure that all the rules are set as required, and that your data will be correctly parsed by the system. Make sure to insert both examples you expect to pass and examples you expect will not pass.
Only then should you click Done and finalize the addition of this Generic ID to your Profile Unification. It can take up to 5 minutes until your new identifier is visible in a schema in the Data Manager.