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Tracking Codes Breaking?

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
November 17, 2017
9 replies
6403 views

Hi!
Over the last few months, our Tracking Code Report has started reporting strangely.

An increasing amount of CIDs are coming into Reports stylized as a series of four numbers, example: "4568"

None of the CIDs we use are only a series of four numbers. Our typical CIDs look something like this: PPC.AI.NA.TXT.NA.NA.REM.GOO.ALL.123

Additionally, this month I've begun to see tracking codes/CIDs show up in Reports stylized as "CTY" followed by four numbers, example: "CTY2403"

Yet, again, we've never used this style as a CID/tracking code.

Anyone have any idea what may be happening?

Analytics

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Best answer by jdonley

I agree with others here in that the most likely issue is something else on your site is using CID param for its own purposes. Do you have any variables recording the previous page or URL? If not, then adding them to your site may help you track down the issue. While you are at it, push the current full URL to an eVar. These things are always helpful for tracking down issues.

Additional things you can check:

a) Search your javascript code to see if s.campaign is getting set from some other URL parameter or some other source. It's possible some new code was introduced, maybe to look at some other URL parameter, cookie, data layer, meta tag, etc. and s.campaign was accidentally used instead of an eVar or prop.

b) Also, check if there are any Processing Rules setup that may be pushing values to the campaign variable.

Edit: Taking a closer look at the other values in your screenshot, I notice that they end in a 4 digit number. And your other values are also built with 2-3 char capital letters. So my new first guess is there may be an issue with whatever logic you have that builds those full values, such that in some cases you are only getting the ending 4 digits of an otherwise full value. Throwing current/previous URL vars into the mix may still help you track down where on your site this is happening, but yeah.. this is where my money currently is now: those values are legit pieces of a fuller value and there is a bug in whatever logic builds the CID values.

Pablo_Childe

Community Advisor

What tool is this? Adobe analytics or AMO? The IDs are they internal or external?

What is your EXT vs INT ids rule structure like? Can you make a couple fake result URLs to illustrate?

toddc59244792Author

Adobe Analytics is the tool. We use a proprietary tool to build the CIDs that we attach to URLs (similar to the Google UTM builder). The proprietary tool keeps a database of all created tracking codes, but none of the random 4 number codes are in the database so I dont believe they were made there and attached to any URLs by my team.

A sample URL with attached CID would look like this:

https://www.exampleurl.com/slug_example?cid=LOC.ALL.LDG.LO41.NA.NA.ALL.GPO.ALL.1310

which is why its confusing to me that we are getting things like this happening in the tracking code report:

As you can see, the correct CID formats are coming through, but there are also random 4 number codes like #93 in the above photo.

Pablo_Childe

Community Advisor

I would then guess a url with a bad character or someone incorrectly sharing your URL is triggering these results.

what i think is happening is :

https://www.exampleurl.com/slug_example?cid=1617

If you correlate the ID to its actual URL(s) what do you see?

toddc59244792Author

If I break it down by original entry page, I get a list of several pages on the site, all of them with click-throughs. Breaking it down by Pages gives me an even longer list. If I break it down by Campaign Landing Page it comes back as Unspecified. Im not exactly sure how I would correlate it with the actual URL in Adobe Analytics. The CIDs are stripped in the Pages Report, so I cant locate a URL with ?cid= attached. How exactly should I correlate it?

PratheepArunRaj

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Hello,

If you are capturing Full URL With Parameter in any of the traffic or conversion variable, you can correlate the same using the dimension. If you are not capturing the same, it is impossible to correlate for now.

Only possible reason for the questioned scenario is the use of CID wrongly as above said :

https://www.exampleurl.com/slug_example?cid=1617

Thank You!

Arun

J

jdonleyAccepted solution

I agree with others here in that the most likely issue is something else on your site is using CID param for its own purposes. Do you have any variables recording the previous page or URL? If not, then adding them to your site may help you track down the issue. While you are at it, push the current full URL to an eVar. These things are always helpful for tracking down issues.

Additional things you can check:

a) Search your javascript code to see if s.campaign is getting set from some other URL parameter or some other source. It's possible some new code was introduced, maybe to look at some other URL parameter, cookie, data layer, meta tag, etc. and s.campaign was accidentally used instead of an eVar or prop.

b) Also, check if there are any Processing Rules setup that may be pushing values to the campaign variable.

Edit: Taking a closer look at the other values in your screenshot, I notice that they end in a 4 digit number. And your other values are also built with 2-3 char capital letters. So my new first guess is there may be an issue with whatever logic you have that builds those full values, such that in some cases you are only getting the ending 4 digits of an otherwise full value. Throwing current/previous URL vars into the mix may still help you track down where on your site this is happening, but yeah.. this is where my money currently is now: those values are legit pieces of a fuller value and there is a bug in whatever logic builds the CID values.

toddc59244792Author

My initial thought was that part of the CID was being stripped and simply leaving the 4 number value, as well. That seems to be the most obvious answer, however when searching the CID database for "1617" (or any of the 4 numbered CIDs) it doesn't populate any results, which makes me think something else is happening. I've checked with my team and no one has seems to know anything about using 4 numbers as a CID they've built..or creating a CID that reads "CTY1566" as mentioned in the very first post.

A few months back we were having issues that was causing actual latitudinal and longitudinal locations of our stores coming through as CIDs, but they solved that (not exactly sure how).

I know we've added code to the site recently to pass parameters from one part of a web form to the next (logic), but I'm pretty sure I dont have an eVar or prop attached to pull any of that data into Adobe Analytics. Could this still be the culprit? I'll need to pour over the source to see exactly what is happening. Could this be an issue with Dynamic Tag Manager? Maybe a pathing issue now?

I took over this role from someone previous, and only worked with Google Analytics prior to this position. Might anyone be able to walk me through setting up to get the Full URL with Parameter and making sure Im capturing the current/previous page?

Pablo_Childe

Community Advisor

The way to check this is to get adobe debugger tool, or use browser Console to look at parameters output. This way when you run your forms, check to see if an unexpected ID is passed. Msg me for more details if you like.

Gigazelle

Adobe Employee

Data pollution like this is a bit tricky to track down, and everyone's responses thus far have been really sound.

First thing I'd do is create a segment containing only hits where these odd campaign values occur. This will allow you to isolate your data to figure out where they might be coming from.
Next, I'd take a look at the referrers report and previous page report to determine if the campaign values are internal or external. If they're internal, you'll want to work with those responsible for the pages that are populating the campaign value oddly. If they're external, you will want to talk with whoever manages the external site.
If there aren't any links with odd campaign parameters, that means there is code somewhere on your site that is interfering. Looking at a Pages report with the segment applied will give you all the pages that the bad code is firing.

Good luck on determining where the issue is coming from, and please let us know what you find!

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