If you’re looking for the Person record of a particular email address using the Visitors report search you might see:
Sorry, we could not find any shoppers matching your query.
Person Not Found. Oops! Sorry, this person could not be found, this person may have been deleted.
There are a few potential reasons why you might see this message.
1. We didn't capture the email address on-site
We weren’t able to record the visitor’s email address, either through an email input or Campaign Based Identification.
If you did enter your email address in an input field on-site, you can use the Site Info Bar or check with our Support team to make sure that we’re tracking it. If you didn’t enter it, then try entering an email address on-site, and then after we've processed it your Person Record should show in the Visitors report.
2. Event Filters
The device being used might have been filtered out of reporting due to Event filters you have configured.
To check this, expand the User menu and go to Settings > Website Settings > Activity Block (Test/Office Data), and check whether the URL or IP address you were using is included in these filters.
If so, then your activity was filtered out and not recorded by the system. You can get around the Event filters by using our Site Info Bar. To access, expand the User menu and select Open site info bar, as any events with the Site Info Bar ignore any Event filters.
3. Person Record became too large
When two records are merged together, our system performs a check to see if the combined Person Record fits any of the following criteria for deletion, based on the default thresholds:
If a serialized Person Record exceeds 1 million characters in length
If a Person Record has more than 10 device IDs associated with it
If a Person Record has more than 10 email addresses associated with it — legacy person merge behaviour only.
If any of these conditions are met, then that Person Record is deleted. These limits are usually only hit by testing records, shared devices, or bots.
These thresholds are the defaults and can be configured by the Support team. If you feel that these thresholds are too low for your customer base, contact Support and request they raise them for you.
This deletion process only occurs when a person merge happens within our system. Person records are merged in several scenarios:
Email address entered on multiple devices
When the same email address is captured on different devices or after clearing cookies, person records are merged to consolidate interaction history and prevent multiple emails.
Email addresses entered on the same device
If multiple email addresses are entered on one device, they are added to the record linked to that cookie. This can cause issues when separate visitors use the same device. To prevent this during testing, use an incognito window or apply Activity Blocks for customer service teams entering customer details.
Clicking a link in an email containing another person's external ID
If an email containing campaign-based ID functionality is forwarded or shared without removing the ID, the original email address is associated with the friend's visit, causing record merging.
Cached pages exposing a visitor's email address to multiple people
If logged-in customers' email addresses are exposed in the page code, and pages are cached, the same email address may be exposed for multiple people, resulting in incorrect record merging. This data protection issue should be resolved by your development team.
To manage person record merging effectively, consider using incognito windows during testing, applying Activity Blocks, and addressing potential data protection issues.
When the email address is seen on-site again, it creates a fresh Person Record for that address and contains a trace like the below which indicates the Person Record with that email address was previously deleted: