Anonymous Visitors

Lytics considers anonymous visitors to be users identified only by a _uid. A _uid is a Lytics tracking value assigned to a cookie. Since cookies can be cleared, aren’t shared across browsers or computers, and aren’t strictly associated with an individual, they are unreliable. For these reasons, Lytics considers these visitors to be anonymous.

The User Profile of an Anonymous Visitor

Anonymous visitors can still have rich behavioral data. Every page they visited, the number of times they
visited, the time they visited, and behavior patterns for data science models. A User Profile is nothing more
than the set of known User Field values associated with the _uid of the Anonymous Visitor.

Identifying Anonymous Visitors

Since all information about anonymous visitors relies on the continued use of a cookie, it is in a marketer's
best interest to convert these unknown users to known users. Cookies are temporary, but email addresses are not.

Note that when a user converts from anonymous to known, all information we knew about them carries with them.
When their _uid becomes associated with an email address (or any other By Field), both Profiles (the _uid profile and
the email address profile) merge through a process called Identity Resolution.