Section Title instances is associated with wrong URL

[Devmalik23]

in our tracking on page load rule we are capturing the page URL in an eVar (v26) which has many sections on it and click of each section we are capturing "section title" in another evar (v48) in an event based rule.When I am pulling a report of Page URLs( v26) broken down with "Section Title" (v48) and pulling v48 (section tile) instances as metrics. It shows section titles which are not on that page. for example 

https://www.xyz.com/home/industries/ has these sections - Let's explore and My lab test

https://www.xyz.com/home/career/ has these sections - Connnect with expert and Talk to your HR

when I am generating a report of https://www.xyz.com/home/industries with breaking it with evar48 (section Tiitle" with "section title" instance as metrics it shows "Talk to your HR" as well as a line item. All the evars have default settings.

Any suggestion why we is this happening ? and what could be the fix?

[yuhuisg · Accepted solution]

Since your eVars have default settings, then I believe their expirations are set to "Visit". In that case, assuming that for some reason, eVar26 hasn't been set on the page yet a hit with eVar48 has been tracked, then eVar48 would be associated with the previous value of eVar26, i.e.

Visit X:

Hit 1: View "Industries" page --> eVar26 gets set.

Hit 2: View "Career" page --> eVar26 does not get set for some reason.

Hit 3: Click a link in "Connect with expert" section --> eVar48 gets set.

No more hits after that.

Then when you run a report for this visit, you will have:

eVar26 = Industries

breakdown eVar48 = Connect with expert

Like you, I hate this kind of non-sensical reports. So in such cases, I prefer to set the eVars with "Hit" expiry, then ensure that I set the values of eVars with every hit. In that way, I am very sure that my reports would make sense.

I.e. my implementation would be:

Hit 1: View "Industries" page --> eVar26 gets set.

Hit 2: View "Career" page --> eVar26 does not get set for some reason.

Hit 3: Click a link in "Connect with expert" section --> eVar26 and eVar48 get set.

Resulting report:

eVar26 = Career

breakdown eVar48 = Connect with expert

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Yes, I agree with @yuhuisg about checking your eVar expiry... generally for that type of tracking the expiry would be set to Hit (if you need it on actions, you will need to explicitly set on your actions, but it prevent data from continuing on to other pages...

The other possibility is that if you have an SPA site, it's possible that the values are being set at the wrong time (basically getting the previous page's value for either the URL or Section Title).

Have you been able to replicate the issue in testing? Or is it something you have only so far seen based on a subset of data?

[Devmalik23]

Thank you @yuhuisg and  Jennifer_Dungan

Correct , expiration of both the eVar is on "Visit" and allocation is "Most Recent (Last)"

I have checked the same on experience though missed page call (e.g Hit 2: View "Career" page --> eVar26 does not get set for some reason.) was not observed.

So you are suggesting we should expire both eVars on hit or just eVar48 which is captured on link click?

Thanking you in advance.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

My rule of thumb is, if the value is Page Specific (and does not need extended attribution), I set the expiry to "Hit" to prevent any data corruption....

You can always apply custom attribution later in Workspace if you need to look back...

But I keep actually "attribution" values (such as campaigns - external and internal, or carrying forward search results, or wall interactions, etc) as attribution ("Visit" or Expiry on a specific conversion events, etc) so that they can be correlated to our conversions... but things like URL, Page Titles, Page Sections, etc (stuff that relates to specific page values) I set to Hit level, as if something fails to set on the next page, those values don't belong there....

[yuhuisg]

Yep, I concur with @Jennifer_Dungan's recommendation about using Hit level for page-specific data.