Monthly active profiles (MAPs)

Monthly Active Profiles (MAPs) are how Contentful measures traffic for Personalization and Analytics. They represent the unique number of profiles that have been active (created, updated) in a month.

Profiles are made of two distinct sources:

• Users on a Personalization or Analytics-enabled site. A user is defined by a stable ID that each session inherits. That's why a single person could create multiple profiles:

  • A site visit by someone that has never been on the site will create a stable ID and create a profile.

  • If the same person accesses the site again, the same stable ID will be used, and therefore the user does not count towards the MAP quota again.
    

    Exceptions: If the user opens up an incognito browser, deletes localstorage/cookies or opens the page on different browsers or devices, the same person could have multiple “profiles”. Where possible, we recommend to identify the user and merge profiles.

• Sending profile data from a data source to Contentful. This can happen via various data pipelines, from our native data source connections or custom ones. Any profile that is “synced” will count towards your MAP usage, even if that user has not visited any of your sites. The amount of MAPs this accrues depends on the amount of unique users/profiles that are synced from your external source. If a single profile is synced multiple times within the span of a month, it does counts towards usage only once.

  • Our native data connectors support the following modes of syncing:

    • Incremental sync

    • Full copy + Incremental sync

For more information on data syncing, see the Data connectors page.

Reasons why MAPs might be higher than expected

There are multiple reasons why MAPs can be higher than expected:

• Bot traffic. Bot traffic is not filtered out by Contentful, and for that reason, any bot visit may create an additional profile that counts towards your MAP usage.

• (Non) Ad blocking. Personalization isn’t blocked by ad blockers to the extent that some other Analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics) are blocked. For this reason, seeing a higher number of MAPs than Google Analytics Monthly Active Users (MAUs) is expected.

• Data syncs. Adding large and frequently updating data pipelines also increases MAP usage.

A single person may visit your content across multiple browsers and devices. To ensure that the user has a single profile to be used for personalizing their experience and b) we only count a person once instead of multiple times, we suggest you merge profiles. Merging profiles can be done by identifying the user with a common identifier across platforms.

From the moment that a user is identified across multiple devices, that user will only count as a single “profile” (in the next month).