A user finds your site on Google while they're at work.
They sign up on their laptop.
Later that night they download the app.
Next morning they finish onboarding on their phone.
A few days later they open the website again because they want to do something that's easier on a bigger screen.
Pretty normal.
Your analytics stack might see that as three different people.
That's the part that drives me nuts.
One person, several IDs#
We talk about “the user journey” all the time, then build analytics systems where the journey basically resets every time the user changes devices.
Web has one ID.
Mobile has another ID.
Attribution has some device identifier.
Replay has a session ID.
Then after login everybody hopefully gets connected to the same user ID.
Hopefully.
And when that doesn't happen perfectly, somebody ends up writing a query later trying to stitch it back together.
Customers don't think in journeys, they just use the product#
I don't think customers care about any of this.
They don't think:
“I've finished the web portion of my journey. Time to begin my mobile journey.”
They just use the product.
So I want the tooling to eventually understand that this:
anonymous web visitor
became this:
registered user
who became this:
mobile install
who is still this:
same person.
What unified identity actually answers#
Then you can ask normal questions.
Did people acquired on web eventually convert in the app?
Did this customer have the same problem on desktop yesterday and Android today?
Where did they actually activate?
Do people who start onboarding on web finish it on mobile?
Was this user seeing the new feature on both platforms?
None of those are especially advanced questions.
They just get annoying when your data is split up.
Why this matters more as ScaleBun adds web#
This is one of the things I think gets more interesting as ScaleBun adds web support.
Shared identity across replay, errors, attribution, analytics, and other events matters on mobile.
It matters even more when the same person is bouncing between browser and app all week.
I don't really want a “web user” and a “mobile user.”
They're just users.
One identity across web and mobile
See how ScaleBun's attribution connects a customer's journey across devices.
See attribution→