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Calling Appcues.page() vs Appcues.identify()

Learn the difference between two components of your Appcues installation: Page Tracking and User Identification.

Written by Ricky Perez

Updated at June 12th, 2024

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There's sometimes confusion over Appcues.page() and Appcues.identify let's clarify.

Appcues implementation best practice:

Ensure that your Appcues.identify(); is called prior to the execution of the first page() call within your Appcues implementation code.

If not implemented this way, your end users could experience a delay due to events buffering while waiting on a user to be identified.

 

Appcues.identify()

  • This function should be called on page load with a userId and some set of user properties that you want to target by. The properties that are sent to Appcues are what is used to determine if a user qualifies for some Appcues content.
  • This function automatically calls Appcues.page(). You should never have to follow an identify call with a page call. In other words, your Appcues code should NOT look like this:
Appcues.identify("user1234", { 
    isAdmin: false,
    created: 12344556677
});
Appcues.page();   // Overkill :)
  • You can call this function multiple times per page to build up the properties on the user object if you're loading data asynchronously. For example:
YourAPI.getUsersFavoriteColor(function(data) {
    Appcues.identify("user1234", {
        favoriteColor: data.color
    });
});
// Further down in your code.
YourAPI.getUsersFavoriteSnack(function(data) {
    Appcues.identify("user1234", {
        favoriteSnack: data.snack   // Cheetos, right?
    });
})

By the time both of those calls return, Appcues knows both the user's favorite color and snack. In the intermediate state, when one has returned and the other is still in the process of returning, Appcues will only know one of the two properties.

Appcues.group()

If you are wanting to ingest account-level properties in Appcues for your users you will need to also call Appcues.group(); after you have successfully identified your user.  For sample group calls please refer to our Installation Overview (for Developers) document.

 

 

Appcues.page()

  • This function should be called when the user has already been identified once since the current page load, but you want Appcues to attempt to show new content. We'll consult the list of content and the current user properties and show content if the user qualifies.
  • The most common scenario where this applies is in "single-page apps" (i.e. apps using React, Vue, Angular, Ember, etc). These apps only do a full page load once and afterwards all navigation occurs without full page loads. Due to this, calling Appcues.identify() once at page load in these apps should suffice. At any navigation change, Appcues.page() can be called and the previous set of user properties will be used.

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