Does an Anonymous xDB Contact facet data get restored for new sessions?

Question

Does data that is added to an unidentified contact (and therefore saved in xDB) get restored upon future visits?

Currently working on a site that

a) has no forms

b) doesn't not currently have a need for identifying contacts.

I would like to store some information about previous visits in the Contact record for use on later visits. Do I need to do anything different given I'm never going to identify this contact?

Answer 1

Anonymous visitor xDB data is stored according to the cookie guid that was placed on the visitors computer as SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBLE_COOKIE. As long as the user doesn't clear his cookies, subsequent visits/interactions will be tracked to that anonymous visitor.

In the event that the user does self identify in some capacity, running Tracker.Current.Session.Identify (identifier) will take the current anonymous visitor record and merge it into a Known visitor record that can be recalled using the Identify method.

At any point cookies are cleared before the Identify method can be executed, the visitor will recieve a new guid, and thus the old interactions tracked by the old cookie guid will no longer be associated to the new visitor guid. This means that those old interactions will not be merged to the known visitor contact when Identify () is ran. While these interactions are still in xDB and can be used for analytics, they are lost to being able to be associated to a known contact.