External IDs

What are External IDs?

Let's say you ran a campaign inside your own CRM tool and then you want to impact the same audience that received your CRM campaign with a second campaign sent from the Digital Reef platform, or vice-versa. How would you go about it?

To do that the system needs to match the users from your CRM or user data base to the same users inside the Digital Reef user data base and for this, both data bases need to contain the same user ID.

That is where the External ID feature comes in handy. We call "External IDs" the user IDs that come from sources that are outside of Digital Reef data bases, such as your CRM or any other external tools you might use to manage your users or marketing campaigns.

How External IDs work?

When users log in to your App, they usually provide a log in identifier such as their email. On log in, your APK associates the email to the specific user ID for that user in your user base.

If you integrate your APK with the DR SDK enabling External IDs, the information regarding each users identifier (email) and ID (External ID) is sent to the DR user data base. Then, the DigitalReef platform will identify each user by their specific External ID.

This allows you to create Audiences inside the DigitalReef platform based on your own user IDs (External IDs).

How to Create an Audience based on External IDs?

1- Make sure that during SDK integration you enable your APK to pass ClientAttributes to DR SDK using the reserved key "External_ID". More information can be found on: https://developers.digitalreef.com/docs/client-attributes

2- In the Digital Reef portal, create a new Audience:

3- Select the option "External Client IDs"

4- Upload a CSV file containing your "external" user IDs, all in one column. No column header is needed. Then click on Finish.

Once this audience is saved, it can already be selected to be targeted by a campaign using the Digital Reef platform.