What causes page views with unspecified pageURL?

[bhutton]

We have an eVar that takes the pageURL on each hit. If it works correctly, we expect it to have a specified URL for each page view server call, but there are a significant amount of page views with an unspecified pageURL lately. What could be the cause of this?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Without knowing more about your implementation, that is hard to pinpoint.

• Where are you setting your eVars? On page views only (s.t)? On clicks/actions (s.tl)?
• How are you setting them? (dynamic variables D=g; are you setting the URLs in full based on Data Elements?
• What is the expiry of the eVar?
• Do you have mobile apps in your suite with lifecycle metrics? Lifecycle metrics are the first hit on a mobile app and generally don't have context variables mapped yet.
• If you are only setting on Page Views and relying on "Visit" attribution to carry the values onto your clicks, is it possible that the first hit for some visits is a click/action as opposed to a page view?
• Have you tried correlating the unspecified data with other variables to try to ger context as to where the data may be missing so that you can attempt to replicate during testing? 

These are just a few considerations for you when trying to track down this issue....

[bhutton]

Hi Jen,

• We set the eVars on page views using a dedicated launch rule and also on many clicks/actions in their respective launch rules.
• We have two URL eVars that are both based on Data Elements. One sets the full URLs (can include tracking parameters appearing after a "?"), and the other sets the non-parametric URL (doesn't include tracking parameters). Their unspecified page views are 1:1 with each other.
• The two URL eVars both expire after page view.
• We do have mobile apps in the report suite with lifecycle metrics, but there are unspecified URL page view from desktop browsers as well.
• The event that should set the page eVars is Core - Window Loaded. A page view should be incurred first every time a page is loaded.
• I have correlated the unspecified URL page views with other events and chipped away at the pile some, but there is still a significant amount remaining.

If the page eVars are set on every page load, how can page views incur without the page eVars setting?

Thanks!

Ben

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Thank you for the details, this sounds like a very similar set up to what we have.

It's sounds like you are on the right track with checking multiple correlations; which if I were looking at your data would be exactly what I would be doing to try and find the issue.

Another possibility, especially if this suite has been around a while, is there a chance that there are Processing Rules or VISTA rules that could be removing the values under certain conditions? You should look into that.. 

Have you found any pattern of correlation that you can identify which pages may be missing the values? What happens when you test on the front end, do you see missing values in those eVars? Do you see values? What happens if you look at post-processed data, are the eVars still there?