Understanding Snowplow's tracking identifiers

Alec Moloney  
Edited

When capturing events, Snowplow offers several out of the box fields to help you identify and track sessions and users.

 

user_id

This identifier is a manually configured identifier set by your logic when initialising the Snowplow tracker. It's included as a default field for all events and can be used for user stitching across services and domains.

 

domain_userid

This stores a field value taken from the first-party cookie set by the tracker.

 

domain_sessionid

This stores a field value taken from the first-party cookie. The domain session is generated by the tracker when a user first visits the website.

 

domain_sessionidx

This field relates to the domain_sessionid by capturing the number of times a user triggers an event after the expiry of the previous session (by default 30 minutes). By combining domain_sessionid with domain_sessionidx we can see how many distinct sessions the user has had.

 

network_userid

This stores a field value taken from the first-party cookie set by the collector.