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Merge Users with same email ids

  • 7 October 2022
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Our Heap instance has multiple heap users (unique Heap User ID) but with same email id due to Heap assigning its own user id for different user interactions throughout user lifecycle. This inflates our unique user count analysis as it shows 10 users even though they all are the same ( email is the same but Heap id is different).

Have any of you faced this? Any way to solve this with and without Engineering intervention ? 
Would love to solve this on Heap side where they identify an email and merge all different user ids into that email.
also, any way to solve this only in reporting for the time being? 

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Best answer by Jonas-Heap 14 October 2022, 20:37

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Hi and welcome to the community! That’s a great question, and this sounds like the perfect use case for Heap’s identify API.

Identify lets you assign your own unique identifier to a user. If the same identity value is assigned to multiple distinct users, those users will be merged together under that identity. So the straightforward solution here is to call identify at the same time you call addUserProperties to update the Email property, and with the same value. That way, if a user is identified as ​​​example@heap.io in each part of their life cycle, all of their separate user IDs will be merged into a single user with that identity.

It’s important to note that identify should never be called with a non-unique value such as “guest” or “null”. This can lead to users getting merged unexpectedly and cause issues with your overall dataset. I strongly recommend giving our Using Identify docs a read—especially the Identity Pitfalls section—before implementing Identify for your site or app. 

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