The ability to recognize and identify users across various platforms and sessions is crucial for providing a seamless user experience. This is where the special external_id property comes into play with Iterate.

The external_id property is a unique identifier, typically a string, which represents a user's ID within your organization's internal system. Unlike Iterate's user ID that gets generated by our platform only, the external_id is designed to be consistent across your system and ours, this could be their user ID within your system, an email address, or other unique identifier.

The primary function of external_id is to enable the identifying and matching of a single user across multiple platforms and sessions. By implementing this property, we can effectively link responses from various sources, making sure that users don't see the same survey twice when not intended, and to help avoid over-targeting or surveying.

Using this feature is particularly beneficial for helping analyzing results, and associating responses and data with your internal systems.

We recommend setting this property.

You can easily add properties to a user that can then be used to target surveys to them and associate the information with all of their future responses. external_id is simply another piece of structured data.