Navigator
Startup

The Messy Reality of Modern Browsing

• Navigator Team

title: “Identity Resolution: Who Are These People, Anyway?”

description: “Understanding the cross-device journey and why one customer looks like three different people in your data.”

category: “Data Governance”

tags: [“identity resolution”, “cross-device”, “tracking”, “attribution”, “first-party data”]

Let’s play a game.

Imagine I walk into your physical store on Monday and look at a pair of shoes. I leave. On Wednesday, I call your store to ask if you have them in size 10. On Friday, I send my assistant to buy them.

To your store manager, this is one sale. To your analytics software, this looks like three different people.

  1. A “window shopper” (Monday).
  2. A “phone lead” (Wednesday).
  3. A “purchaser” (Friday).

In the digital world, this happens millions of times a day. And it is wrecking your data.

It’s called the Cross-Device Problem.

The Messy Reality of Modern Browsing

Here is a typical user journey for a B2B software buyer:

  1. Morning Commute: Sees your LinkedIn ad on their iPhone. Clicks it. Browses for 30 seconds. (Device ID: A123)
  2. Office: Gets to work, opens their laptop. Googles your brand name. Visits the pricing page. (Cookie ID: B456)
  3. Evening: Sitting on the couch with an iPad. Retargeting ad pops up. They click and finally sign up for a demo. (Device ID: C789)

If you look at your basic analytics, you see three unique visitors.

  • Visitor A bounced.
  • Visitor B browsed.
  • Visitor C converted.

Your math tells you that mobile ads (Visitor A) are a waste of money because “nobody converts.” So, you turn off the LinkedIn ads.

Suddenly, Visitor B and Visitor C disappear too. Revenue drops. You panic.

This is why Identity Resolution is the most boring-sounding topic that will actually save your business.

How We Stitch It Together

Identity Resolution is the art of looking at those three “people” and realizing they are all just… me.

There are two ways to do this. One is easy and inaccurate. The other is hard and expensive (which is why you hired us).

Method 1: Probabilistic (The “Best Guess”) This uses algorithms to guess. “Hey, this iPhone and this Laptop access the internet from the same IP address every night at 8 PM. They are probably the same person.” It’s like assuming two people at the same dinner table are married. Usually true, but sometimes it’s just a weird first date. It’s about 60-70% accurate.

Method 2: Deterministic (The “Hard Proof”) This is what we aim for. We look for a “login key.”

  • When I click the LinkedIn ad on my phone, I don’t log in.
  • When I browse on my laptop, I sign up for your newsletter. Bingo.
  • Later, I click an email link on my iPad. Bingo.

Now we have an email address (a unique identifier) linking the laptop and the iPad. We still might miss the phone, but we have connected two out of three.

The “Logged-Out” Black Hole

The biggest challenge you face is that most people don’t log in until the very end. They are ghosts until they pull out a credit card or give you an email.

This is why we push you so hard to capture emails early.

I know you hate pop-ups. I hate pop-ups. But if you don’t get that email address (the “primary key”), you are flying blind. Offering a PDF, a discount, or a webinar isn’t just lead gen; it’s an identity anchor. It allows us to go back in time and say, “Ah, this user isn’t new. They’ve been stalking us on mobile for three months.”

Why This Matters for Your $25k

You aren’t paying us to just count clicks. You are paying us to tell you where to allocate budget.

Without identity resolution, your attribution model defaults to “Last Click.” The iPad gets 100% of the credit for the sale because it was the last device used. The iPhone (which started the journey) gets zero credit.

If you make decisions based on that, you will fire your “openers” (Mobile/Social) and double down on your “closers” (Retargeting/Email). Eventually, you run out of new people to close.

A Note on Privacy (The Elephant in the Room)

I have a bad feeling about this—and maybe you do too. Is this tracking creepy?

Well… yes.

Technically, we are building a profile of a user across their devices. However, the landscape is shifting. Apple’s iOS updates and the death of third-party cookies are making this much harder.

We can no longer rely on Facebook to tell us who people are. We have to own the data ourselves. This is called First-Party Data.

If a user gives you their email, they are consenting to a relationship. You are no longer spying on them; you are remembering them. There is a distinction.

We build your infrastructure to respect that distinction. We don’t buy data from shady brokers. We build systems that recognize your actual customers.

So, the next time your marketing team says “Mobile isn’t converting,” ask them if they are looking at users or devices. If they don’t know the difference, send them to this wiki.