Stage 01 of 07 · Identity across the lifecycle
Attract is the stage where a visitor becomes a tracked-but-anonymous identifier — a cookie ID, a device ID, a client-side session — before you know anything about who they are. Nothing here is verified yet. Everything downstream inherits whatever gets attached to that anonymous ID now, which is why the handoff out of this stage is the highest-leverage failure point in the whole lifecycle.
Last reviewed 27 Sept 2026
The handoff
Marketing attribution stitches sessions to the anonymous ID, but the moment the visitor logs in, the CIAM layer issues a new identity and nothing maps the old one forward. Three sessions of browsing history, a wishlist and two abandoned carts evaporate at the exact moment you can finally attach a name to them.
Tell — you find out never. Nothing logs the ID that got dropped.
What resolved looks like
The anonymous identifier is carried through authentication and merged into the verified profile as its first identifier, not discarded at the door. Personalization continues from where the anonymous session left off instead of restarting at zero.
Systems that read this stage — Ad platforms · tag managers · anonymous CDP profiles
anonymous_iddevice_id_ga