Demystifying identity resolution

Identity resolution in the SaaS world aims to understand customer behaviors across various touchpoints, but achieving this consistently presents challenges due to business use case variability and technological limitations. The concept revolves around distinguishing between unknown users, identified by temporary device-scoped identifiers, and known users, who have permanent identifiers like email addresses or user IDs. In experimentation, identity resolution is crucial at both the point of assignment and analysis to ensure consistent user experience and accurate attribution of events and metrics to test groups, especially when users switch devices or sessions. While experimentation tools can deterministically assign known users to test groups based on immutable IDs, resolving identities for unknown users requires complex engineering solutions. Statsig offers a data warehouse-native solution for identity resolution that supports the mapping of anonymous identifiers to known user IDs, allowing accurate metric calculations across different platforms and sessions.