Media Tag Testing and Validation Guide

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Tim Cook
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Organizations can integrate data from all their media-buying activities by integrating the Salesforce Audience Studio tagging infrastructure into their campaigns. This article describes the general process for verifying and validating Audience Studio Media Tagging.

Validating Media Trackers

It's important to validate your media campaigns once they've been tagged with Audience Studio Trackers and are live. You don't have to check every single tag that is going to be exported, but you may want to test two to three variations of ad server served placements and two to three variations of site served. 

Ad Server Served Placements

If you are validating ad server served placements you want to first make sure everything is setup correctly within the ad server. Click for ad server implementation guide. Once you are sure everything is setup correctly in the ad server you want to create a test page by doing the following:

  1. Exporting a sample tag from the ad server and pasting it in to a text file such as "note" on Windows and "TextEdit" on Mac.

  2. Save the text files with an "html" extension for example "text.html," use your default browser to open the html file.

  3. Browsers like Chrome and FireFox have robust developer tools. They can be accessed by right clicking and selecting "inspect element" or through hot keys - for example on a Mac you can hold "alt/option" + "command" + "i" to access developer tools in Chrome and FireFox.

  4. Once developer tools is open you will want to navigate to the "Network" tab and filter for "krxd."

  5. Filtering by "krxd" will show all of the Audience Studio calls being made on the page. You will now want to follow the instructions below for both the Salesforce Audience Studio Impression Tracker and Salesforce Audience Studio Click Tracker

Example exported ad server tag to be used for testing: 

ea03bce7-7159-4967-ad03-3bfdc411e667.png

Site Served Placements

If you are validating site served placements you want to first want to review the site served tags that were provided to the publishers to make sure they are ok. Click for site served implementation guide. Once you are sure everything that was provided to the publishers is correct you will need to request a test page or "tear-sheet" from the publisher. They should be able to easily provide this from most publisher ad servers. While troubleshooting you want to keep in mind the common site served issues listed above in "Considerations" Once the publisher has provided a tear-sheet you want to do the following:

  1. Use a browser like Chrome or FireFox to take advantage of their robust developer tools. They can be accessed by right clicking and selecting "inspect element" or through hot keys - for example on a Mac you can hold "alt/option" + "command" + "i" to access developer tools in Chrome and FireFox.

  2. Once developer tools is open you will want to navigate to the "Network" tab and filter for "krxd."

  3. Filtering by "krxd" will show all of the Audience Studio calls being made on the page. You will now want to follow the instructions below for both the Salesforce Audience Studio Impression Tracker and Salesforce Audience Studio Click Tracker.

If you are unable to create a test page using a text editor use the following tools and follow the instructions above from 3. on:

 

Test for Browser Impressions

  • The Audience Studio pixel (http://krxd.net/ad_impression.gif...) is returning "204 no content" when viewing network status details.
  • If you see the pixel fire then you can move on to the next step. If you don't you want to check the ad server to make sure that the placement you are testing as Audience Studio tracking applied to it or if site served, confirm with the publisher that the Audience Studio Impression Tracker was setup for the placement they provide in the tear-sheet
  • Now that you've seen the pixel fire you are going to want to click into the response under the network tab to review the "headers."

    ad_impressions.png
  • The confIDs visible in response header parameters match the confIDs you were provided.
  • You also want to make sure the following values are being returned correctly, especially the required values such as "campaignID":
    kxbrand, campaignID, advertiserid, placementID, adID, creativeID, siteID.
  • It's important that there are no special characters being passed to any field, especially a required field. This can result in the campaign not showing up in reporting at all or under the campaign name "-", instead of it's actual name.

If everything is set up correctly you should see a "204 no content" response for ad_impression.gif and controltag?confid= with corresponding IDs where the macros once were. (if Site served there wouldn't have been macros.)

Test for Clicks

Use Chrome developer tools, or the Firebug browser extension and use the Network or Net tab to check that:

  • The pixel is returning "302 Found" when viewing network status details for the click tracker.
  • The confIDs visible in response header parameters match the confIDs you were provided.
  • The following values are being returned correctly, especially the required values such as "campaignID":
    kxbrand, kxcampaignID, kxadvertiserID, kxplacementID, kxadID, kxcreativeID, kxsiteID.

If everything is set up correctly, you should see a "302 Found" response for click_tracker/track. If you received a "400 Bad Request" or a "504" there is something wrong with the click tracker and troubleshooting is needed.

When testing the Audience Studio Click Tracker using developer tools you want to make sure that the developer tools module is open before you click on the ad. Otherwise you will miss the response. A larger number of ads open in a new page. If this is the case developer tools won't suffice and debugging tools will need to be used. If you are using a debugging tool like Charles or Fiddler you don't have to worry about this. However, you will want to make sure the tool is recording before you click the test ad.

If using Pointroll use creativeID for both creativeID and adID

If using Sizmek use adID for both adID and creativeID

 

Common status errors when implementing the click tracker

HTTP Status Error

Occurrence

Reason

Correction

204 No Content

SF Audience Studio click url

The expected response of the Audience Studio click tracker. If a response with content is required by the ad server, please contact your client partner for an alternative URL.

  

500 Internal Server Error

SF Audience Studio click url

Malformed click URL prevents Audience Studio from reading the request properly.

Check attribute values in Dev Tools >> Network tab. The values most likely have not updated and the macros still persist. Check ad server configuration to ensure macros are dynamically replaced.

If values look ok, are there any unexpected special characters in the URL that is causing a malformed URL?

503 First Byte  Timeout

clk param

Macros are not being replaced by the ad server

If the tracker url is fired without the macros being replaced, you can also get this error

504 Gateway Timeout

 

clk param

 

Malformed landing page URL. 

Verify landing page URL is correct and any query params are carried through from the ad server. If they are not, special characters may need to be encoded to avoid drop off of query params. 

Unresolved Name Error

clk param

Domain or protocol may be incorrect.

Verify domain of click tag url is correct.

If domain looks ok, check protocol. i.e. duplication http://http://

Test for In-App Impressions

Audience Studio collects in-app media exposure through a pixel as an app environment will generally not support JavaScript.

The same verification steps from above apply, however the Audience Studio ID must be populated with the devices raw mobile advertiser ID.  This ID must be available in all impressions, without hashing and casing is to be preserved.

A fully populated Audience Studio pixel for an impression on iOS will look like:

https://beacon.krxd.net/ad_impression.gif?confid=config123&kxbrand=Pop_Rocks&campaignid=456&advertiserid=123&placementid=789&creativeid=cde&adid=0ab&siteid=fgh&_kuid=23798CFD-3526-4D68-93B2-DFBB12BFC410

Keys:

Field Name Example Data Data Description Data-Type Max Field Length
Configuration ID config123 Salesforce Audience Studio unique identifier for an marketers media initiatives; for example the “Display” ConfigID could be used per brand and could encompass Display (Static and Animated), Video Companion, Even Video is needed, as well as Audio media. It could also be used across multiple brands and be tied to a number of different channels within Audience Studio. Alpha-Numeric 255
Kxbrand255 Pop_Rocks Descriptive name of the brand. This can be used if brand is not used at advertiser level or is used on campaign level and needs to be grouped Alpha-Numeric  255
CampaignID ab12 Numeric ID representing a campaign within the ad server of record; always present/required field Alpha-Numeric 255
AdvertiserID 123 Numeric ID representing a advertiser within the ad server of record; a name can be added as a place holder if there is only one advertiser within ad server - applicable most often in channels that aren't Display; always present/required Integer 255
PlacementID cd12 Numeric ID representing Placement within the ad server of record; always present/required field Alpha-Numeric 255
CreativeID 123 Numeric ID representing Creative ID within the ad server of record; present depending on ad server Integer 255
AdID  123  Numeric ID representing Ad within the ad server of record; present depending on ad server Integer   255
SiteID fgh Numeric ID representing Site, as derived from the Ad Server Alpha-Numeric 255
The values above under "Field Name" represent an Audience Studio Impression Tracker. When using the Audience Studio Click Tracker all keys under "Field Name," with the exception of "Configuration ID" and "KxBrand" will have a "kx" appended to the beginning. For example "KxCampaignID."
The values above under "Max Field Length" represent the maximum amount of characters that are acceptable to pass into Audience Studio.

*Mandatory Keys:
ConfigID, CampaignID

The IDs associated with these keys should NOT contain special characters except "-" or "_". (Special characters are any non-alphanumeric characters like *, ! or %)

Troubleshooting

It's imperative to continuously check the campaign data in Salesforce Audience Studio , even after the tags have been validated. Issues may arise and it's important to diagnose the issue and fix it at the source. Monitoring the data captured will ensure Salesforce Audience Studio is capturing as much data as possible, which will ultimately be beneficial. It's recommended to perform weekly or bi-weekly checks on campaign data into Salesforce Audience Studio.
This section will explore what you need to look for when troubleshooting by identifying issues and understanding considerations.
You can use what we covered in the validating section above to help validate and fix issues that have been identified. 
Lastly we will cover tools and pro-tips for troubleshooting.

Identifying issues

Steps for Validating Campaigns & Placements:

  1. Export the campaign(s) and placements that have been tagged from the ad server.
    ex. export a csv/xsls from DCM report builder. 
  2. Login into Audience Studio and visit Campaign Performance module, Activation >> Marketer: Campaign Performance.
  3. Make sure that the date range in Audience Studio matches the date range in the report exported from the ad server.
  4. By clicking the button at the top right, "Export to Excel" you will download a report broken out by campaign. Click into a campaign and "Export to Excel" to export specific placements within the campaign if needed.



  5. Compare Audience Studio and the ad server's impression and click.
  6. If you notice any of the issues listed below on the campaign level you will want to follow the same steps at the placement level by simply clicking into the campaign you'd like to validate. 

Considerations

Common issues:

  • Impressions and/or clicks don't match within +/-20% of the ad server
  • There are clicks recorded, but no or lower impressionse177a056-c242-4954-a79e-7baa46eb58a1.png
  • There are more than a million impressions recorded, but 0 clicks recorded 
Common causes:
  • There could be a potential issue with the trackers setup in the ad server. It's recommended that you export sample tags that should be tagged with Audience Studio and test by following the validation steps below. 

    Ad server issues include the following:
    • Tags are not applied to specified placements 
    • The correct ad server macros aren't being used
    • JavaScript Audience Studio tags are applied to VAST placements 
    • The ConfID isn't correct
    • The tracker is missing the "campaignID" parameter 
  • This could be caused on a campaign and placement level by missing or incorrectly setup site served placements. To this day Publishers still struggle placing site served 3rd party trackers. If possible request a tear-sheet from the publisher and follow the validation steps below. [provide link here] When sending tags to publishers you will want to make sure they've read through and understand the following documentation on site served implementation. [provider link here]

    Site served issues include the following: 
    • The click tag was implemented in place of the impression tag
    • The click or impressions tags weren't actually implemented at all
    • The click or impression tags are missing ConfID or it isn't correct
    • The click or impression tags are missing a required parameter, such as "campaignID"
    • Instead of an ID being passed through required parameters, a special character that isn't alpha-number or a dash "-" or underscore "_" is being passed. This can result in the campaign not showing up in reporting at all or under the campaign name "-", instead of it's actual name.

Business Consideration: Even though Audience Studio is approved on a number of publishers sites and on a number of networks, partner policies change from time-to-time, so please check work with those partners for the latest information.

It is also important to take note that while there are publishers who do not allow our tracking pixel, we have developed some creative ways to still collect partial and full data sets. Please work directly with the Salesforce Audience Studio Solutions team for additional information.

Audience Studio calculates impressions and clicks in UTC, whereas most ad servers will process the data local time per account. This means there could be some variances by default.

Tools

Recommended free tools:

 

Need Help?

If you need help with Media Tag Validation, don't hesitate to contact the Salesforce Audience Studio Solutions team at kruxhelp@krux.com.

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