Order of Operations for Analytics IDs

After you deploy the visitor ID service, there are 5 ways a visitor can be identified in Analytics.

In many scenarios you might see 2 or 3 different IDs on a call, but Analytics will use the first ID present from that list as the official Experience Cloud ID. For example, if you are setting a custom visitor ID (included in the vid query parameter), that ID will be used before other IDs that might be present on that same hit. See Setting Analytics and Experience Cloud IDs for more information.

Order Used
Query Parameter (collection method)
Present When
1st
vid (s.visitorID)
The s.visitorID is set.
2nd
aid (s_vi cookie)
The visitor had an existing s_vi cookie before you deployed the Experience Cloud ID service, or you have a grace period configured.
3rd
Experience Cloud ID (MID)
The visitor's browser accepts first-party cookies. This is set by the AMCV cookie.
4th
fid (fallback cookie on H.25.3 or newer, or AppMeasurement for JavaScript)

A browser doesn't accept third-party cookies and the Analytics tracking server is set up as a third-party tracking server.

Note: The fid is a legacy identifier and is not used if you've implemented the ID service on your site. In this case, the fid is not needed because the first-party, AMCV cookie makes it obsolete. It has been retained to support legacy code and for historic reasons.

5th
IP Address, User Agent, Gateway IP Address
The visitor's browser does not accept cookies.
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