I am using link to generate deep linking. I am using their public API's endpoint to generate links.
Here is their endpoint: https://api.branch.io/v1/url
I append my branch key and data that I need to associate in this link. Everything is working fine but I need to expire this link within one hour.
Reading up here: https://github.com/BranchMetrics/branch-deep-linking-public-api#creating-a-deep-linking-url
I added "duration" key also, but it didnt expire the link.
It will be great if anyone could help me in figuring out how to expire branch.io link.
Alex from Branch.io here: the duration parameter is used for something different, so it's not going to be able to do what you want. We don't have a built-in feature to expire links, but you could create something close to it yourself:
Add a custom link parameter containing a timestamp for when the link was created.
Check for that timestamp when handling the link at the destination, and do something different if it is more than an hour old. I'm guessing this would be inside your app, and also on whatever fallback URL you have specified for when the app isn't installed or the user is on desktop.
Mail from branch.io support team suggested this answer as below:
If you found out about the $exp_date parameter from here then the
parameters in that list are only used for iOS Spotlight Indexing but
will be used by Branch in the future. A better solution than
utilizing $exp_date is to code logic into your client to determine
what to do with link data based on date. This way, your deep links
will always work and always carry data through, and you won't have to
worry about users clicking empty links.
This way, you would include date as an extra meta key/value pair, and
examine this date in your client when receiving link params to
determine if you want to honor the link's contents or not.
Related
The Dynamic Links documentation states:
If you don't need to track click data and you don't care if the links are long, you can manually construct Dynamic Links using URL parameters
I'd prefer to use the long URLs (easier dynamic creation) but the above docs imply I'll lose click data. The campaign parameters can still be given to this URL, and the link is still hosted at Firebase, so it's not clear to me which analytics we'll lose here. Does anyone know the full details on this statement?
Firebase team responded that the UTM data is still recorded, it's just the click count which is lost in the Firebase console.
I'm pretty sure the answer to this question is "no", but I would like to get a definitive answer from an official source, and also understand what my alternative options might be.
Long story short, my app has old data in it that used to include user email addresses as a GET parameter. Those URLs are showing up as unique page view URLs in Google analytics, like this:
I don't want to be recording email addresses in my Google Analytics account (for privacy reasons), and I have fixed the code that was causing this in the first place, but I also want to delete or scrub the old data that currently exists in Google Analytics.
From everything I've read, it doesn't sound like this is possible without completely deleting the property, maybe even the account?
To be clear, I am NOT interested in creating new views that don't include URLs with email parameters in them, or otherwise change the view and not the data. The data needs to be gone and be completely inaccessible to anyone with access to this Google Analytics account.
Here are the options I've come up with:
Delete the property and start over. I'm pretty sure this will
actually delete the collected data, but it's not clear to me if I
would have to actually delete the account itself to achieve that.
Set the data retention time to the lowest possible value (looks like 14 months right now) and wait 14 months for it to go away https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7667196?hl=en
Perform some kind of magic to get in contact with an actual human at Google who could help me scrub or remove this data.
Does this sound right? Are there options I'm missing? If there's a way to do this through a Google API that would not be a problem.
If this is still a relevant issue. GoogleAnalytics provides a way to delete some data. Universal Analytics https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9450800?hl=en and GA4 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9940393?hl=en&ref_topic=2919631
You are right: changing the data, that you have collected, and Google Analytics have already processed, is not possible. You have the option to make changes during processing with various filters, e.g. Search-and-replace filters, but as it is written in this official support article:
Like all filters, search-and-replace filters only apply to hits
collected after you've applied the filter to the view (filters cannot
change historical data).
Regarding you suggested options:
Deleting a view or property will result in a permanent loss of data after a 35 days period of waiting time. (While this could be undone.) So unless the requirement of scrubbing the collected PII is more important than having your historical data, this should not be a way to go. The same applies to deleting the whole account, so it would be enough to delete affected properties or views.
From the article you have linked as well, you can see, that data retention is about removing user and event level data, and it will not affect the data in aggregated reports. My understanding is, that an already created, page level report will keep showing the page with an email address:
Keep in mind that standard aggregated Google Analytics reporting is
not affected.
I hope these references help you to evaluate your options. Sorry for not being able to come up with a solution, but the basic concept is, as highlighted in this Google article:
Once Analytics processes the data, it’s stored in a database where it can’t be changed
I'm getting some very strange behavior in DTM. When our page loads (from a local instance of the website) we get the expected call going out with the proper dev report suite. When a custom link call is made from that page, for some reason DTM sends it with a production report suite. If I look in Adobe Analytics for the custom link name reported under the prod RSI, it does not show up in there.
Any ideas on what is going on and how I can fix this issue?
This is my shot in the dark based on what you have said, and it is based on the assumption that your statements are true (e.g. you aren't seeing pink elephants, that the request was indeed showing your prod rsid in the proper portion of the request url, that you did in fact check your prod rsid after an acceptable amount of time has past, no segment or other filter shenanigans, etc..: in short, that you do know how to accurately perform the basic QA song and dance).
Under that assumption, the below is a scenario that can plausibly reproduce what you are describing. I could be partially right or totally off for your specific situation, but there's really no way for me to know for sure without having access to your DTM instance.
The Scenario
Long story short is it sounds like you have a blend of custom code and DTM automatic settings enabled, and DTM is overriding and/or not caring about your custom code for link tracking.
More specifically, it sounds to me like you have AA implemented as a tool in DTM, and in the config settings, you have your production and staging rsids specified in the text fields.
Then in the General section, you either do NOT have values specified for Tracking Server and Tracking Server Secure, or else they are set to the wrong values.
Then, in the Library Management section, you have either selected "Managed by Adobe" in which case DTM takes care of the library, or else you have selected "Custom" and you are adding the library yourself AND you have NOT checked "Set report suites using custom code below".
Then, somewhere in DTM (e.g. the Library Management > Custom code box, or Customize Page Code codebox) you have code that pops rsid stuff (e.g. s.account, s_account, dynamicAccountList stuff), and possibly also trackingServer and trackingServerSecure.
Finally, you (like most other people, because DTM's double script include for staging vs. prod is.. dumb) just use the prod script include on your page, and either use the debug/staging mode or rely on whatever rsid routing logic you've setup to route to dev.
So.. when the page is first loaded, DTM loads the AA library and it sets variables and stuff based on what you specified in the tool config. During this time, it is also popping any custom code blocks you have in the tool config, which may or may not override what you have specified in the tool config fields, depending on what you enabled. Then after that, it pops stuff you have in page load rules (if any), etc..
But then comes the link click.. As I have mentioned in other posts on SO, DTM has this caveat (IMO bug) about how it references the AA object after the initial page load/AA request: basically, it doesn't. Instead, it makes use of internal methods (the main one being a .getS() method) to create a new instance of the AA object, based on whatever things you have configured in the tool config section. Well here's the rub.. it does NOT account for or execute any custom coding you have done in code boxes in the tool config section.
So that basically happens whenever an event based or direct call rule is triggered, and it effectively screws you. Why does DTM do this? I do not know. IMO Adobe needs to change this feature caveat bug. Either they should refactor DTM to execute the code boxes, OR they could, you know.. just reference the original AA object created, like any normal script would do..
But in any case..
So for example, my theory here is that page loads fine, points to dev rsid based on your setup. But then you click a link and an event triggers, and DTM makes a new AA object not caring about your custom code, so all it has to go on is what you have in the tool's config fields.
Since DTM doesn't actually have any rules around the prod vs. dev rsids you specify in those fields (you have to write custom code in the custom code boxes - that DTM ignores!), it just pops the prod rsid, because that's the script include you have on your page.
Then as far as not seeing the data actually show up in your prod rsid: again, since DTM ignores what you set in your custom code boxes, it's defaulting to what is specified in the trackingServer fields in the tool config, and my assumption here is they are either blank or wrong (you should be able to look at the request url to adobe to verify this). This theory is because you said the prod rsid is right, and you see a request being made. So the next culprit would be wrong tracking server specified.
So, that is my theory of what's going on. Maybe it's all right, maybe it's some right, hopefully it may point you in the right direction at least.
Edit:
If you can confirm that this is indeed how you have things setup, then you will naturally ask "Okay, well what do I do about that?". As I have said in a lot of my other SO answers.. basically, your only option is to uncheck all the settings that make DTM automate AA, and in all your rules, keep the AA section disabled and whatever AA vars you wanna set, set them yourself and make the s.t() or s.tl() call yourself in a 3rd party script code box, so that it continues to reference and pop based off the originally instantiated AA object.
Update
Based on your comments below, okay so yeah.. that sounds like what I described, and accounts for prod rsid popping. As for data not showing up in report.. so if you are certain tracking server is set correct (the request url looks good) then this isn't a DTM issue. Here are some other explanations for why the data wouldn't show up:
Are you sure the request is being sent to your prod rsid? I don't know what you are looking at to verify this, but this is where you should be looking: In the request URL to AA: "http://[trackingServer value]/b/ss/[s.account value]/1..."
Click request isn't making it to Omniture. Verify in a packet sniffer that the request is actually made and that you are getting a 200 OK or NS_Binding_Aborted response.
You aren't waiting long enough to check for the data. Even basic hit data and looking at "real time" reports takes a little bit of time to show up.
You have a segment/filter active that's not jiving with the data you are trying to look at. Make sure that you don't have anything applied. Or, if you are using those things to find your data (and aren't seeing it), ensure that you are correctly applying it.
You recently created the rsid and the "go live" date hasn't passed yet. Data will not show up in the report suite until up to 24 hours after the specified "go live" date.
You have a vista rule in place that's affecting data showing up. Some companies have a vista rule in place for a number of reasons and there are a million ways it could affect data (e.g. routing to a different report suite). For shits and grins, check your dev (or other rsids) to see if your data showed up there. Even if that doesn't make sense, at least it's a step forward.
You have a bots / ip exclusion rule in place that's catching data from your location.
The data sent in from the link click isn't relevant to the report. For example, maybe you are looking at e.g. prop10 report and prop10 isn't actually sent in the click request.
I know a lot of these are basic things to check, and no doubt you've checked, but check again. Have someone else check for you to be sure. I'm not questioning g your abilities here, but even the best of coders forget to cross their t's and dot their i's sometimes, and manage to miss obvious things. If you are sure about all of these then contact Adobe ClientCare because I really can't think of anything else that wouldn't involve an issue with Adobe's backend.
I ran into a similar problem with my implementation. Essentially what I did was set the s.account variable directly inside the doPlugins, so it would be set on all tracking calls. I wrote specifics here also: DTM Tracking Account
I am playing with Google Analytics API and found that when I get the web property list, I have a defaultProfileId very useful. It can just help me pass the queryProfiles call, to save one request and make the whole app works faster.
But I noticed that some web properties just don't have the defaultProfileId thing.
Just for the information, most of the situations happens to a tracking ID like UA-XXXX-1.
Any tips?
Thanks!
You are correct webProperty does not always return a defaultProfileId. I was also unable to find any information on the Web Properties page as to how the API decides what a Default Profile Id is. I submitted a bug report for it, with the Analytics dev team you can find it at: defaultProfileId - not always sent with a WebProperty. Lets hope they come with a response you are correct this is a very useful feature.
Yes you are probably going to have to query the profiles every time to get the correct profile you are after.
I just found this:
https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/management/accounts/~all/webproperties/~all/profiles?oauth_token={Token}
There should be away of working that to make one request for accounts, one to get all the Web Properties , then one to get all the Profiles.
Important: This question isn't actually really an ASP.NET question. Anyone who knows anything about URLS can answer it. I just happen to be using ASP.NET routing so included that detail.
In a nutshell my question is :
"What URL format should I design that i can give to external parties to get to a specific place on my site that will be future proof. [I'm new to creating these 'REST' URLs]."
I need an ASP.NET routing URL that will be given to a third party for tracking marketing campaigns. It is essentially a 'gateway' URL that redirects the user to a specific page on our site which may be the homepage, a special contest or a particular product.
In addition to trying to capture the referrer I will need to receive a partnerId, a campaign number and possibly other parameters. I want to provide a route to do this BUT I want to get it right first time because obviously I cant easily change it once its being used externally.
How does something like this look?
routes.MapRoute(
"3rd-party-campaign-route",
"campaign/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}",
new
{
controller = "Campaign",
action = "Redirect",
custom = (string)null // optional so we need to set it null
}
);
campaign : possibly don't want the word 'campaign' in the actual link -- since users will see it in the URL bar. i might change this to just something cryptic like 'c'.
destination : dictates which page on our site the link will take the user to. For instance PR to direct the user to products page.
partnerid : the ID for the company that we've assigned - such as SO for Stack overflow.
campaignid : campaign id such as 123 - unique to each partner. I have realized that I think I'd prefer for the 3rd party company to be able to manage the campaign ids themselves rather than us providing a website to 'create a campaign'. I'm not
completely sure about this yet though.
custom : custom data (optional). i can add further custom data parameters without breaking existing URLS
Note: the reason i have 'destination' is because the campaign ID is decided upon by the client so they need to also tell us where the destination of that campaign is. Alternatively they could 'register' a campaign with us. This may be a better solution to avoid people putting in random campaign IDs but I'm not overly concerned about that and i think this system gives more flexibility.
In addition we want to know perhaps which image they used to link to us (so we can track which banner works the best). I THINK this is a candiate for a new campaignid as opposed to a custom data field but i'm not sure.
Currently I am using a very primitive URL such as http://example.com?cid=123. In this case the campaign ID needs to be issued to the third party and it just isn't a very flexible system. I want to move immediately to a new system for new clients.
Any thoughts on future proofing this system? What may I have missed? I know i can always add new formats but I want to use this format as much as possible if that is a good idea.
This URL:
"campaign/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}",
...doesn't look like a resource to me, it looks like a remote method call. There is a lot of business logic here which is likely to change in the future. Also, it's complicated. My gut instinct when designing URLs is that simpler is generally better. This goes double when you are handing the URL to an external partner.
Uniform Resource Locators are supposed to specify, well, resources. The destination is certainly a resource (but more on this in a moment), and I think you could consider the campaign a resource. The partner is not a resource you serve. Custom is certainly not a resource, as it's entirely undefined.
I hear what you're saying about not wanting to have to tell the partners to "create a campaign," but consider that you're likely to eventually have to go down this road anyway. As soon as the campaign has any properties other than the partner identifier, you pretty much have to do this.
So my first to conclusions are that you should probably get rid of the partner ID, and derive it from the campaign. Get rid of custom, too, and use query string parameters instead, should it be necessary. It is appropriate to use query string parameters to specify how to return a resource (as opposed to the identity of the resource).
Removing those yields:
"campaign/{destination}/{campaignid}",
OK, that's simpler, but it still doesn't look right. What's destination doing in between campaign and campaign ID? One approach would be to rearrange things:
"campaign/{campaignid}/{destination}",
Another would be to use Astoria-style indexing:
"campaign({campaignid})/{destination}",
For some reason, this looks odd to a lot of people, but it's entirely legal. Feel free to use other legal characters to separate campaign from the ID; the point here is that a / is not the only choice, and may not be the appropriate choice.
However...
One question we haven't covered yet is what should happen if/when the user submits a valid destination, but an invalid campaign or partner ID. If the correct response is that the user should see an error, then all of the above is still valid. If, on the other hand, the correct response is that the user should be silently taken to the destination page anyway, then the campaign ID is really a query string parameter, not a part of the resource. Perhaps some partners wouldn't like being given a URL with a question mark in it, but from a purely REST point of view, I think that's the right approach, if the campaign ID's validity does not determine where the user ends up. In this case, the URL would be:
"campaign/{destination}",
...and you would add a query string parameter with the campaign ID.
I realize that I haven't given you a definite answer to your question. The trouble is that most of this rests on business considerations which you are probably aware of, but I'm certainly not. So I'm more trying to cover the philosophy of a REST-ful URL, rather than attempting to explain your business to you. :)
I think the URL rewriting is getting out of hand a little bit lately. Not everything belongs to the URL. After all, a URL is supposed to describe a resource that can be searched for, discovered or manipulated and it seems to me that at least the partner ID and the custom fields from above are not part of the resource.
Not to mention that that at some point you would like to actually keep the partner ID constant across multiple campaigns and that means that it is now orthogonal to the particular places they need to visit. If you keep these as parameters, you will allow your partners to access uniformly multiple resources on your website, while still reliably identifying themselves, so you can track their participation in any of your campaigns.
It looks like you've covered all of your bases. The only suggestion I have is to change
{custom}
to
{*custom}
That way, if you ever need to accept further parameters, you don't have to take the chance that old URLs will get a 404. For example:
If you have a URL that looks like:
campaign/PR/SO/123
and you decide in the future that you would like to accept a fourth and fifth parameter:
campaign/PR/SO/123/blah/foo
then the first URL will still be valid, because you're using a wildcard character in {*custom}. "blah/foo" would be passed as a string to your action. To get those extra two parameters, you would simply split the custom argument in your action by '/'. Add some friendly error handling if they don't exist and you've successfully changed the amount of information you can receive with a campaign URL without completely breaking URLs already in the wild.
Why not use URL encoded variables instead of routes? They're a lot more flexible - you can add any new features in the future while still maintaining 100% backwards compatibility. Admittedly, it's a little more trouble to type manually, but if there's all those parameters anyway, it's already no picnic.
http://mysite.com/page?campaign=1&dest=products&pid=15&cid=25
To me, this is much more indicative of what is really going on. Using paths implies a that a resource exists at that location. But really you're just providing a web service with various parameters, and this model captures that much more clearly. And in the future, you can add more parameters effortlessly. You can also default parameters if they are missing without messing anything up.
Not sure of the code in ASP, but it should be trivial to implement.
I think I'd look at doing it the way that SO does it's questions.
"campaign/{campaign-id}/friendly-name-of-campaign"
Create a mapping in your database when the campaign is created that associates all the data you need with an automatically generated id. The friendly name could be assigned basically the same way as a question is on SO -- by the user -- but you could also have an approval process that makes sure that it meets your requirements and is distinct from any existing campaign names. Your tracking company can track by the id and you can correlate that with your associated data with a simple look up.
What you have looks good for your needs. The other posts here have good points. But may not be suitable for you. One thing that you could consider with future proofing your links is to put a version number somewhere in there.
"campaign/{version}/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}"
This way if you decide to completely change your format you can up the version to 2.0 (or whatever) and still keep track of the old links coming in.
I would do
/c/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/?customvar=s
You should think about the hierarchy of the first parameters, you already got that managed quite well. Only if there's a hierarchy path segments should be used.
From your description, destination seems to be the broadest parameter, partnerid only works with destination, and campaingid is specific to a partner.
When you really need to add custom parameters I would go for query variables (they are not forbidden in REST), because these are not part of the hierarchy.
You also shouldn't try to be too RESTful here. After all, it's for a campaign and for redirecting to a final resource. So the URL you want to design here is not really a specific resource in the terms of REST.
Create an URL called http://mysite.com/gateway
Return an HTML form, tell your partners to fill in the form and POST it. Redirect based on the form values.
You could easily provide your partners with the javascript to do the GET and POST. Should be trivial.
The most important thing i have learned about REST URL´s thats usually burried deep in some book or article:
The URL should point to a resource and the following ?querystring should have all the scoping information needed. DONT mix those two or you will have a design thats very hard to work with.
Other then that i fully agree with Craig Stuntz