Tech Note: Account ID vs Account IDs

You may have noticed that Pendo has a Visitor metadata field called “Account IDs” and an Account metadata field called “Account ID.” So what’s the difference?

Account ID is the Account ID value that a visitor was assigned at the time an event occurred. This will always be a singular value.

Account IDs is a list of all Account ID values a visitor has ever been associated with. This could be a singular value or a list of values.

For example, Pendo has captured events for Creed from 3 different Account IDs as shown below. Pendo associates specific events with the Account ID that was assigned to Creed at the time the event occurred. So Creed had 32 events associated with Test Account 1, 5 events associated with Test Account 2, and 1 Event Associated with Test Account 4. Because my Visitor List has a column for "Account ID", Pendo breaks the events out into 3 different rows.

If I remove the column for "Account ID", all of the events get aggregated into a single row.

Guides

If you use a segment with "Account ID" criteria for a guide, the visitor will only see the guide if that's their current Account ID value. This is likely whatever Account ID value was passed through your code snippet on the page where the guide was launched.

Segments with "Account IDs" criteria are not eligible to be used for guides.

Let's say Creed is on a page where he has been assigned the Account ID "Test Account 1" and there is a guide on that page.

Analytics

If you use a segment with "Account ID" criteria for a report (let's say the Visitor List table on the Visitors page), Pendo would only surface the events for the visitor that were associated with that Account ID.

If you use a segment with "Account IDs" criteria for a report, Pendo will surface the events for the visitor for every account they have been associated with as long as they were associated with the Account ID in your segment at some point in time.

*If you don't have the Account ID column in your report, you would only see one row, but event totals will be aggregated only from the accounts shown above for each segment.

Segment Visitor Totals

When you create a segment, Pendo gives you a count of how many visitors fall into that segment. Creed would count in the visitor total for any of the segments in the tables above. For example:

However, this does not mean he will see a guide that is segmented to any of these accounts. We have already reviewed an example where Creed would be eligible to see a guide assigned to "Account ID equals Test Account 1" but not eligible to see a guide assigned to "Account ID equals Test Account 4". He is still counted in the totals for both segments, though, because he has had events associated with both Account IDs.