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Anonymous users

CommandBar has a built-in way to anonymously build a user profile for each user. This is accomplished during installation, where the engineer installing CommandBar can provide a primary key with which to identify a user.

However, there are situations where your users might be anonymous. For example, you may be hosting CommandBar on a marketing site or blog, where you don't know the identity of your users.

Without the ability to remember which users have seen what, CommandBar would be far less effective. For example, it would be impossible to know which users have seen a nudge, meaning the nudge would likely show for each user every time they visit your site -- that sounds really annoying!

CommandBar can automagically remember anonymous users out-of-the-box, so this situation doesn't occur.

I have anonymous users. What special steps do I need to take during installation.​

If you're the engineer installing CommandBar, and you're dealing with anonymous users, make sure to pass null to boot, like this:

// All users anonmyous
window.CommandBar.boot(null);

// Some users anonymous
if (user.id) {
  window.CommandBar.boot(user.id);
} else {
  window.CommandBar.boot(null);
}

Do not pass a static id; this will register the same user for every session -- which will wreak havoc with your targeting logic.

For billing purposes, how does CommandBar track anonymous users?​

When you have anonymous users, we don't count each session as a unique user for the purposes of monitoring your MAU quota.

For anonymous users, we use our own user fingerprinting to remember who is who, which gives us an estimate of how many people are interacting with your site that features CommandBar. We apply some conservative dampening factors to ensure we don't overcount anonymous users for billing purposes.

If you have any questions about how anonymous users are calculating for your account (for example, maybe you want to triangulate against an internal source), please reach out to us via your preferred support channel (Slack, email, chat). If you believe we're overcounting you, also, please reach out. If you believe we're undercounting you...well that's our bad, and we won't blame you if you don't reach out =)

How do anonymous users appear in my Dashboard, for analytics purposes?​

Anonymous users are grouped by an anonymous ID that CommandBar assigns for fingerprinting. You'll see an icon next to the ID to distinguish anonymous users (identified by CommandBar) and users identified by you (using your own anonymous ID schema).