ID transformations

This guide explains how ID transformations work in Bloomreach and how they help maintain consistent customer identification across your tracking and import data.

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Note

ID transformations apply to both tracking and imports. Real-time ID tracking lets you automatically apply a selected transformation to all tracked IDs. You can also apply the same transformation to a list of IDs imported into your project. Learn more in the Web tracking and Data imports articles.

Customers' IDs transformation

You can create multiple hard and soft IDs for customers in Bloomreach. These IDs automatically go through trim transformation, and you can choose to enable or disable lowercase transformation. This ensures consistent formatting and efficient handling of customer IDs.

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Important

Discuss and agree with your teams before enabling or disabling transformations. Changes can significantly affect the consistency of your data.

Trim ID transformation

Trim transformation removes all whitespace from the beginning or end of a string.

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Note

Trim transformation is mandatory and automatically enabled for every new project. If your project was created before this feature released on 17 Dec 2018, contact your Bloomreach representative to enable trim transformation.

Examples of trim transformations

Lowercase ID transformation

Lowercase transformation converts all characters to lowercase. It's an optional feature, but you should avoid toggling it on and off repeatedly — doing so can create significant inconsistencies in your tracked data.

Your decision to enable or disable lowercase transformation should depend on whether you want customer IDs to be case-sensitive.

Why enable the lowercase transformation

Say you track events from two email addresses: [email protected] and [email protected]. These represent the same customer, but inconsistencies between your CRM and ecommerce platform can cause them to appear as separate IDs. Without lowercase transformation, Bloomreach assigns these events to two different customer profiles — reducing data quality.

Enabling lowercase transformation ensures both IDs map to a single unique customer. Enable lowercase transformation on IDs that hold plain-text emails. Keep it disabled on IDs that hold cookies and hashed emails.

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Note

Enabling transformations only affects data that flows into your project after the change. Re-import any existing data to apply a trim or lowercase transformation to it.