If you would like to pass additional key-value pair data with your verification, e.g., "status": "platinum" or "favorite_color": "blue", you may do that as well. You need to take 2 steps:
- Add the key(s) in the Campaign and Metadata Options card in the Program Settings page, so that your program knows to save these values.
- Update the URL that calls SheerID, to append the metadata as parameters
WARNING: Never send personally identifiable information (PII) to SheerID as campaign metadata, other metadata or in URL parameters. Any metadata you pass to SheerID in these ways should refer to campaigns or other items of interest, not individuals. PII should only be submitted to SheerID in verification subject JSON body (or through our verification forms), to ensure this data is processed subject to the relevant privacy and security controls. If you must store metadata associated with an individual, it is your responsibility to encrypt and/or tokenize that information before storing it as verification metadata.
Step 1: Add the keys
- Log in to MySheerID, click on your program, and click on Settings
- On the Campaign and Metadata Options card, click the dropdown caret to display the metadata options control field.
- Click the toggle switch to On to turn on Metadata.
- Enter the name of the key you would like to report on, followed by either a space or a comma. Upon entering the space or comma, your key will be saved in your program.
- Repeat the above process if you wish to track multiple key-value pairs in your verification reporting.
NOTE: We recommend using lowercase letters (and optionally underscores) when defining your keys, e.g., customer_id. The keys and the corresponding values will be passed to SheerID in the URL of the verification, and are meant to be human-readable when reviewing reporting data. Including special characters in your key may result in avoidable parsing errors.
Variation 1: optional keys
By default, newly saved keys are considered optional. If metadata is for performance tracking or "nice to know", then we recommend keeping the key optional so as to not cause friction for the people trying to verify.
Variation 2: required keys
Sometimes it's super important that every verification has a value for one (or more) of the keys you specified. For example, most account tagging reward strategies rely on knowing a user identifier in order to enable that user to redeem the offer after being verified. In these cases, we support making the key a required key, to reduce the number of customer journey edge cases that you need to account for.
If a key is required, but missing a value, then the verification form will show an error. You can modify this error message, to provide instruction to your customer on how to rectify the situation.
Example use case for required metadata
Let's dig a bit deeper into an account tagging example. In this scenario, let's say I need to update my customer records in Salesforce Marketing Cloud whenever a customer of mine is verified. In order to achieve that, for every successful verification I need to know which customer record to update. While I could configure my customer journey to handle guest checkout, it gets complicated to later marry a customer identifier and a verificationID.
The simpler path is to instruct my customers to first sign to their account on my site (or create an account), and then show them the verification form. Then I can easily send the customer identifier of the logged in customer to SheerID when the verification form is loaded, to be stored as metadata wit the verificationID; on verification success, I then always have the customer identifier to turn around and update in Salesforce.
I call this customer identifier a "customerID" in my instance of salesforce, so I save "customerID" as my key and mark it as required. That way if a site visitor ever gets to the verification form without being logged in first, the form will automatically instruct them to first log in to their account on my site before verifying. I can then set up account tagging knowing I can rely on always know the correct customerID.
Step 2: Modify the URL loading SheerID
Variation 1: static values
This is straightforward. Simply append the key-value pair to the URL loading the SheerID verification form.
Variation 2: dynamic values
Let’s say that you have used SheerID’s Javascript snippet to embed the SheerId verification form in a page you own. And you want to save custom metadata to your verification records, that will come from the URL opening your page.
You can achieve this using dynamic metadata values. Your web developer can easily define a custom variable, set it for a given site visitor by pulling from the page URL (or whatever other source you specify), and then pass that value into the URL calling SheerID’s verification form.