Overview
The Experience Cloud Visitor ID (ECID) is a universal, persistent, pseudonymous ID that identifies users across all of the solutions in the Adobe Experience Cloud. It can be used when building integrated solutions with many Experience Cloud technologies - such as Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Target and other solutions and services.
Some legacy references for the ECID are -- MCID, MID and MCVID
Use Cases involving ECID
You may have an integration use case that will involve the ECID. Here are a few examples...
Sending real-time event data to Adobe Analytics
You may have user event data that occurred adjacent to that user's behavior on the website or with the mobile app. This could be survey data, a voice call into a support center, or possibly some campaign interaction data that occurred offsite. You can send this to the Adobe Analytics collection service in real-time using the Data Insertion API. When using this API you'll need to send the ECID as the value of the <marketingCloudVisitorID> element. This will allow your event data to be tied to the correct user within Adobe Analytics.
Adobe Analytics exporting user-level behavior data from Adobe Analytics
You may need to export data tied in Adobe Analytics (AA) to specific users. If you have been able to capture the Adobe ECID, you can use it to link your user data to data you export from AA. Exporting data from AA, including the ECID, can be done in two ways. First, you can export summarized reports from the Data Warehouse using the Data Warehouse APIs. Second, you can download event level data using a Data Feed export.
Onboarding audiences to Adobe Audience Manager
You may have valuable user profile data that can be loaded into Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) for use in audience targeting activities. You can use the ECID to deliver this data to AAM using the Batch Data Transfer Process. Alternatively, the AAM cookie ID or mobile advertising IDs (IDFA, AAID) can also be used to identify the user for these imports.
See also the AAM Onboarding integration guide.
Capturing the ECID
There are a few ways to capture the ECID if you need to store it as part of your integrated solution.
Using the ECID Service
Adobe provides a highly scaled service for ECIDs to be generated, assigned and retrieved. This service is accessed through a Javascript API , Adobe Experience Platform Launch, direct endpoint integration and the Adobe mobile SDKs.
To retrieve the ECID using the Javascript API you would get reference to the Visitor object and then call the getMarketingCloudVisitorID method (for AppMeasurement) or the Alloy "getIdentity" command (for Web SDK).
See the full Experience Cloud ID Service documentation.
AMCV Cookie
If you have code on a webpage where the ECID service is implemented you can pull the ECID from a first party cookie that will live on the page. The ECID is not the only piece of data within the AMCV cookie, so you'll need to parse it out, see Cookies and the Experience Cloud ID.
Note, the format of the AMCV cookie remains fairly stable since several implementations have been build upon it, but there is always a small amount of risk that Adobe engineering could change the format and you would then need to update your parsing solution.
Is the ECID PII?
If you will be collecting, storing and using the ECID as part of an integration you might need to know how to legally treat this ID. You'll need to consider this with your legal team since there are many considerations, including -- what is your use case, what data you'll be linking to the ECID, what geographical region the user is operating in, etc.
Technically the ECID is a randomly generated string, not a hash of any personally identifiable data (like email address, phone or CRM ID). However, your usage of the ECID may have personal data implications under the various privacy laws in place around the globe -- such as GDPR, DAA, NAI, CCPA, etc.