| Audience | Data and marketing teams using Identity Resolution |
| Prerequisites | An existing Identity Resolution project with at least two of the required identifying fields (last name, address, or payment info). |
Householding extends Identity Resolution by linking related profiles into shared household groups for deeper segmentation, analytics, and personalization.
Learning objectives
After reading this article, you’ll know how to:
- Enable and configure Householding in your Identity Resolution project
- Understand how Hightouch determines household membership
- Use the Household Graph and its computed attributes
- Leverage household data in Customer Studio for segmentation and targeting
Overview
Householding builds a Household Graph alongside your existing Person Graph to link individuals into common households. These relationships are inferred using shared attributes like last name, physical address, and payment information. Each household receives a unique household_ht_id that connects all members of that household.
Requirements
To enable Householding, you need:
- An existing Identity Resolution project
- At least two of the following fields in your source data:
- Last name
- Physical address
- Credit card information
Enable Householding
- Go to the Configuration tab in your Identity Resolution project settings.
- Toggle on Householding.
- Verify that the required fields are available in connected sources.
How Householding works
Hightouch analyzes your unified profiles to find individuals who share household characteristics:
| Match type | Description |
|---|---|
| Last name matching | Profiles with the same last name |
| Address matching | Profiles residing at the same physical address |
| Payment information matching | Profiles using the same credit card |
When at least two of these three attributes match, Hightouch groups those individuals into a household and assigns a unique household_ht_id.
Household Graph
Once enabled, you’ll see a new Household Graph in your project in addition to your Person Graph. It includes:
- Household parent model — A table representing each unique household with computed attributes
- Household output tables — Tables storing household relationships and metadata
Household attributes
The household parent model automatically computes the following attributes:
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
household_id | Unique identifier for the household (same as household_ht_id) |
household_size | Number of profiles in the household |
has_couple | Boolean indicating if the household contains a couple |
has_children | Boolean indicating if the household includes children |
Use households in Customer Studio
In Customer Studio, individual profiles are linked to their household through the household_ht_id column. This relationship enables you to:
- Segment audiences by household characteristics
- Build household-level metrics and aggregations
- Create campaigns targeting entire households
Example use cases
- Household acquisition campaigns — Target households with no existing customers
- Family promotions — Send offers to households with children
- Household lifetime value — Measure total spend across all members
- Multi-buyer households — Identify groups where multiple members purchase