Unify Onboarding Guide

This guide walks you through the set up process for a simple Unify space, which you can use if your Segment implementation is simple. If your implementation is complex, you can use this to demonstrate and test Unify before working on a more complex configuration.

Unify configuration requirements

To configure and use Unify, you need the following:

1. A Segment account and Workspace.
2. Events flowing into Connections from your digital properties where most of your valuable user behavior occurs.
3. Unify or Engage identity admin access. You must have edit access to identity resolution rules. You can check your permissions by navigating to Access Management in your workspace settings. See the Segment Access Management documentation for more details.

Step 1: Create a new Developer space

When you first start working with Unify, you should start by creating a “Developer” space. This is your experimental and test environment while you learn more about how Unify works. You can validate that identity resolution is working correctly in the Developer space, and then apply those changes to your Production space once you’re sure everything is working as expected.

This two-space method prevents you from making untested configuration changes that immediately affect production data.

Step 2: Invite teammates to your Segment space

You probably have teammates who help set up your Segment Workspace with the data you need. Invite them to your Unify dev space and grant them access to the space. Navigate to Access Management in your workspace settings to add them.

Step 3: Connect production sources

1. From your Segment space, navigate to Unify settings and click Profile sources.
2. On the screen that appears, choose one or two production sources from your Connections workspace. Segment recommends connecting your production website or App source as a great starting point.

Once you select sources, Segment starts a replay of one month of historical data from these sources into your Unify space. We’re doing this step first so you have some user data to build your first profiles.

The replay usually takes several hours, but the duration will vary depending on how much data you have sent through these sources in the past one month. When the replay finishes, you are notified in the Sources tab under Settings, shown below.

Once the Source(s) finish replaying, data from your connected Sources flows into Unify in near real time, just like it does for sources in your Segment workspace.

Step 4: Check your profile data

Once the replay finishes, you can see the data replayed into Unify using the Profile explorer. You should have a lot! The data should include information from multiple sources and multiple sessions, all resolved into a single profile per user.

Before you continue, check a few user profiles to make sure they show an accurate and recent snapshot of your users.

A good test is to look at your own user profile, and maybe some colleagues’ profiles. Look in the Profile explorer for your Profile, and look at your event history, custom traits and identifiers. If these identifiers look correct across a few different profiles (and you can verify that they are all correct), then you’re ready to create an audience.

If your user profiles look wrong, or you aren’t confident users are being accurately defined and merged, stop here and troubleshoot. It’s important to have accurate identity resolution before you continue. See the detailed Identity Resolution documentation to better understand how it works, and why you may be running into problems. (Still need help? Contact Segment for assistance.)

Step 5: Create your production space

Once you validate that your data is flowing through Unify, you’re ready to create a Production space. Segment recommends that you repeat the same steps outlined above, focusing on your production use cases and data sources.