Identify Visitors without Email - Is it possible?

[chriscorsair]

Hi all,
I am looking at using the Identify Visitor endpoint in our app to assign them to the respective contacts in Hubspot. Ideally though, I would do this without passing publicly identifiable information, that is, using an ID instead.

Hubspot's docs state that an email is required, but then states further down that you can pass an ID instead, with the one limitation being it won't create a contact. That is fine for us, as this is simply aligning existing contacts, but my questions for this are:

1. Does this mean we can pass an ID instead of an email?
2. If so, what ID is this? Would it be the Hubspot Contact ID? Or something separate which we will need to match elsewhere? Or another ID completely?

Anybody's experience or insight would be greatly appreciated. The language isn't quite clear to me.

[IsaacTakushi]

That's correct, @Chris_H. Happy to help!

[IsaacTakushi · Accepted solution]

Welcome, @Chris_H!

The language is a bit murky, so I'm happy to clarify further.

You can pass an id instead of an email address, but the analytics data will only be associated with a physical contact record if either:

• You previously identified a visitor with both an email and the id.
• You've been associating activities with the id and the visitor converts on a HubSpot form (which requires email).

Thus, email needs to come into the picture at some point. Let me know if you have follow up questions!

[chriscorsair]

I see, so basically this ID is defined and passed with an email during either of those two inputs. So the ID is not the ID of a Hubspot contact.

Thanks for your assistance!