Golden Record

Audience: Platform admin, data or analytics engineer in consultation with marketer
Prerequisites: IDR overview →, Setup steps →, Prepare your data →

Use the Golden Record to create one clean, trusted profile per person—ready for activation, analytics, or personalization.

What is a Golden Record?

The Golden Record is a flattened, one-row-per-user table built from your identity graph. It contains the best version of each trait (like email, phone, or name), selected using survivorship rules you define.

Instead of reviewing every record tied to a person, you get a single profile with the most relevant, reliable fields.

• Build audiences

• Sync to tools like Salesforce or Braze

• Run analytics with clean, deduplicated customer tables

Why use a Golden Record?

Example use cases

• Send emails to the most recent address per user
• Run LTV analysis with all purchases under one identity
• Sync only the most trusted name and phone to your CRM
• Personalize product recommendations across merged profiles

How it works

Golden Record table

When your IDR model runs with Golden Record enabled, Hightouch creates a *_golden_records table with:

• One row per HT_ID
• A single, trusted value per identifier (email, phone, name, etc.)
• Custom fields and traits you choose to include
• All values selected using survivorship rules

Survivorship rules

Choose how Hightouch picks values across merged records:

You can apply different rules to each field. For example:

• Use the most recent phone number
• Use the most frequent email
• Store all unique zip codes as an array

Secondary tables

Hightouch also writes additional tables to your data warehouse:

How to configure Golden Record

1. Go to your identity model and open the Golden Records tab
2. Toggle on Enable Golden Record

3. Click Add column and choose a trait
4. Set a survivorship rule for that trait

For each field, select how Hightouch should choose the value:

You can define different rules per column—for example, choose the most recent phone number, but the most trusted email.

Info: You can revisit and update these rules anytime.

5. Click Save changes, then Run the model

Hightouch will write the *_golden_records table to your warehouse.

Example output

Here’s a simplified view of what you get:

You can sync this table to a downstream tool or use it as a trusted customer table in your warehouse.

Where you can use it

• In your warehouse for analytics dashboards

• In Customer Studio as the parent model for segments and traits

• In syncs to CRMs, ads, or messaging platforms

• In dbt or Looker for clean joins and models

Inside Customer Studio

If you use Customer Studio, the Golden Record becomes the parent model. That means:

• All related input models are joined automatically using HT_ID

• Traits can be defined visually, without SQL

• You can alias column names for clarity (e.g. email_primary, email_all)

• You can't edit joins or break the model, keeping your identity graph stable

Outside Hightouch

Because Golden Records exist in your warehouse, you can use them in:

• Analytics dashboards

• Data science pipelines

• Direct joins with behavioral or transactional data

• Warehouse-native activation via dbt or Looker

What’s next

Once your Golden Record is live:

• Review and QA your matches using Summary and Profiles views
• Build audiences using clean, trusted traits
• Sync downstream with confidence-level filters