Visitor Deletion Jobs (Early Access)

The Visitor Deletion Jobs feature is currently in early access and only open to select customers at this time. If you are interested in trying out this feature, please contact your account manager for information about early access.

How it works

A visitor deletion job is an automated process to delete multiple visitor records from all products in the Tealium Customer Data Hub. A visitor deletion job processes CSV files that you upload to the S3 bucket for your account (a Tealium S3 bucket or your own S3 bucket). These CSV files contain visitor IDs that specify the visitor records to delete.

When a visitor deletion job is enabled, it checks the S3 bucket every hour for a new CSV file. When a new file is found, the job processes the CSV file and for each visitor ID, deletes the visitor profile data from the following areas in Customer Data Hub:

• Tealium AudienceStream
• Tealium AudienceStore
• Tealium AudienceDB
• Tealium EventStore
• Tealium EventDB

You can use the visitor deletion job interface to check the status and results of each CSV file that is processed. After a file is processed, a log file of the results can be downloaded from the interface for legal record-keeping and GDPR compliance auditing.

You can also use the visitor lookup tool or the visitor lookup API to delete visitor records, but with those methods you can only delete one visitor at a time. A visitor deletion job allows you to delete multiple visitors at once.

Requirements

• Permission Needed: Publisher role.
  For more information, see Managing Server-Side User Permissions.
• Access to an Amazon S3 bucket to upload the CSV files.

File processing limits

Keep in mind the following limits on file uploads and file processing:

• The maximum CSV file size is 10 MB.
• The maximum deletion data processed per hour is 1 GB (100 CSV files of 10 MB each). If the 1 GB maximum is exceeded, those files are processed at a later time.
• High demand in a region may result in slower processing times.

File formats

Input file

A visitor deletion job processes CSV (Comma Separated Values) files containing a header line and visitor ID values. The first line specifies the name of the visitor ID attribute that is being used to identify the visitor records to be deleted. The job ignores this line when it processes the file. All other lines in the file contain a single visitor ID attribute value.

For example:

"customer_id"
"00003579"
"00035728"
"00000352"
...

File prefix

The input files must be named using the following format:

{prefix}_{version}.csv

FORMAT	DESCRIPTION
prefix	A unique identifier for a specific visitor deletion job.
version	A unique identifier for a file within a prefix, usually a timestamp and an optional version number.

If a file with a duplicate file name is uploaded, it will not be processed.

File names are case-sensitive and cannot contain special characters other than hyphen ‘-’ and underscore ‘_’.

For example, if a job deletes visitor data based on the customer_id attribute, the prefix for the CSV files could be customer_id_deletes and the version could be the month, day, and year in mmddyyyy format.

File names with this prefix and version would be as follows:

customer_id_deletes_03152021.csv
customer_id_deletes_03172021.csv
customer_id_deletes_03212021.csv
...

Results file

After an input file is processed, the results are available for download as a log file. Each line of the results file contains a visitor deletion confirmation record with the following fields:

• Visitor ID value (same value from the input file)
• Confirmation UID
• Status, one of the following:
  • Success - Visitor profile was found and deleted.
  • Failed - not found - Visitor profile could not be found.
  • Failed - error - The visitor profile was not deleted. Includes details on why the deletion failed.
• Timestamp, if Status = Success, date and time when the visitor was deleted.

Managing visitor deletion jobs

Adding a visitor deletion job

Before you add a visitor deletion job, first determine which visitor ID attribute you will use to identify the visitor records to be deleted.

To create a visitor deletion job:

1. Navigate to Server-Side Tools > Visitor Deletion Jobs, then click + Add Visitor Deletion Job.
2. Enter a name for the job.
3. Select a File Service from the list.
4. Enter the prefix of the file names for this job.
   All CSV files for this job must begin with this prefix.
5. Select the Visitor ID Attribute that is used in the CSV files.
6. If you are ready to begin processing visitor deletions, toggle Enable/Disable Visitor Deletion Job to ON.
7. Click Save.

After you have added a visitor deletion job, you can delete visitor data by creating a CSV file and uploading it to the Amazon S3 bucket for the job.

For more information on uploading a CSV file, see Upload a File to a File Service.

Editing a visitor deletion job

To modify a visitor deletion job:

1. In the Visitor Deletion Jobs list, select a job.

   

   
   The Job Summary is displayed and shows the following for each file in the S3 bucket:
   • Date - The date the job was run.
   • File Name - The name of the input file that was processed.
   • Status - The status can be one of the following:
     • Processing - The CSV file is being processed. A job can have the In Progress status for up to 6 days while deletions are being processed. Larger files require longer processing times.
     • Completed - The CSV file has been processed and the results are available for download.
     • Failed - An error occurred during CSV file processing. A job can fail for various reasons, including AWS service issues or lack of permission for a data source.
   • Job ID - A unique ID for this file and the processed results.
   • Rows - Number of rows in the input file.
   • Success - Number of successful deletions.
   • Errors - Number of errors and deletions that failed. The results file provides more information on deletion errors.
2. Click Edit.
3. When you finish editing, click Save.

Enabling a visitor deletion job

If you expect to be uploading CSV deletion files on a regular basis (every day or every week), you can keep the job enabled. If you will be uploading files less often, you may want to disable the job to avoid having the job check for CSV files unnecessarily.

To enable a visitor deletion job:

1. In the Visitor Deletion Jobs list, select a job.
2. Toggle Off to On.
3. In the confirmation dialog, click Enable.

Deleting a visitor deletion job

Deleting a job and its history of processed files is permanent. You cannot undo this action.

To delete a visitor deletion job:

1. In the Visitor Deletion Jobs list, select a job.
2. In the Summary screen, click Delete.
3. In the confirmation dialog, click Delete.

Viewing the results for a visitor deletion job

To view the results of a processed file:

1. In the Visitor Deletion Jobs list, select a job.
2. Select a visitor deletion job.
   The Files section of the Summary page shows a list of processed files, including the file status.
3. Locate a processed file, then click Download.