Discrepancy Troubleshooting With Third Party Tracker

This will guide to troubleshoot discrepancies with any third party tracking platform

Phaniraj S.R avatar
Written by Phaniraj S.R
Updated over a week ago

Transparency being a core offering at Kayzen, we allow advertisers to use multiple impressions tracking URL across different creatives to track through multiple third-party vendors. Impression tracking URLs are sent to publisher apps as part of bid response, when an ad is served publisher SDK fires respective impression tracking URLs from trackers.

Click flow; Click tracking URL is sent to publisher app through adm field in bid response. For creative type like Image, Native Kayzen first record the clicks and call the advertiser click tracking URL. In case of HTML by default Kayzen will not be tracking clicks, hence advertisers need to use Kayzen {CLICK_URL} macro with encoded click URL For Ex: URL must be encoded like this, {CLICK_URL}https%3A%2F%2Fad.doubleclick.net%2Fddm%2Ftrackclk%2FN992.2192503%2FB25816067.303821394%3Bdc_trk_aid%3D496761703%3Bdc_trk_cid%3D151155614%3Bdc_lat%3D%3Bdc_rdid%3D%3Btag_for_child_directed_treatment%3D%3Btfua%3D%3Bltd%3D. For Video advertiser click tracking will get a click call directly from the publisher app.

Data discrepancy can happen between any two platforms on both impression and click tracking for a number of reasons. Here are a few common reasons for identifying discrepancies in most cases.

Report Time zone: Make sure you acknowledge the time zone for the reports you compare with Kayzen and any third party tracking solution, by default Kayzen reports is available in UTC but you also can select the required time zone in the report section.

Kayzen Impression/Clicks are unique: Impressions and click numbers across platforms are unique. We are integrated with exchanges to track only viewed impressions when actual creative markup is rendered, and impressions/clicks are deduplicated on bid_id or auction_id. Most of the cases third party trackers may track more clicks or impressions compared to Kayzen because of the mentioned reason..

Implementing impression pixel: Always make sure, a valid impression pixel is used and put it in the right field along with the creatives. Make sure macros are placed correctly and no static values are hardcoded like cachebuster, timestamp. Ensure URLs don't have any spaces in between and are encoded correctly.

Correct Implementation of Clicktracker: If there is no click recorded by third party tracker, make sure the Clicktracker is setup correctly and also debug using web debugging tools like Charleslog to ensure tracker behaviour in click chain

Implementation of Kayzen macro’s correctly: Ensure macros are been used correctly in the URL’s as few of third party’s verify the traffic through key values they receive from macro’s.

Click discrepancies on Video: Many third party tracking solutions consider multiple clicks for a video creative uploaded with a video along with an endcard but Kayzen always considers a unique click for the same. Also, we noticed for a few of our exchange partner’s SDK they fire multiple clicks for the same click and for few others due to UX limitation of the app it may also force users to make multiple clicks. This will cause third party tracker counting more number of clicks compared to Kayzen gross

Discrepancy Troubleshooting Strategies

The first approach to investigate any impression or click discrepancy, can be through narrowing it down to any specific field, for ex: There may be a one single publisher app for which impressions or clicks might not be recorded except other publisher apps where campaign has served. Logs for impression or clicks will be recommended to debug such cases, as most of the logs will have required fields. The kind of fields you would try grouping-by may include:

• App Bundle

• Publisher

• Site ID

• App ID

• Operating System

• Device Model

• Exchange

If in case, the discrepancy is narrowed down to any particular field. Ensure you also reproduce the same finding for different dates or campaigns and share them for further debugging with the Kayzen Support.

Contacting Kayzen Support:

When you contact Kayzen Support/PSS team, ensure that you provide enough data for the support team to conduct a clear side-by-side comparison of the two data sets.It’s recommended that your report must have the following;

Reporting structure:

• Kayzen and third party reporting with matching date range and filters

• The filtering criteria (e.g. Campaign ID, app_object, date range)

Reporting Group-by

• Date

• Bid_id (Kayzen bid_id)

• Creative ID

• Inventory Source

• App Bundle

• Publisher

• Site ID

• App ID

• Any other available fields

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