Digital Analytics provides three reports to help you identify and troubleshoot tracking links:

• Invalid Marketing Programs
• Invalid Real Estate
• Invalid Site Promotions

These reports can help you identify links that are improperly formatted or are missing elements. Consider setting up recurring email notifications of these reports to monitor invalid links that need your attention.

Each row in the report shows an invalid link, the number of clicks, and one of the following error codes:

Missing Element

Indicates that an element is missing within the parameter values. Check to ensure that all of the required elements are included, separated by -_-. All parameter values must be present in the destination URL on the landing page on your website.

If you don't need all of the required parameters, you can pass null or na as the parameter values.

Malformed Parameter

Indicates an incorrect parameter value. This error code means that the destination URL contained the correct code type (either cm_mmc, cm_re, or cm_sp), but that something after the code type was invalid. Check the parameter values for invalid characters that would break the link.

Avoiding invalid tracking links caused by redirects

It happens when a page on your website forwards visitors to another page and can strip out all or portions of the tagging parameters that we use to create your reports.

Procedure Alter your redirects to pass along or persist parameter values in the Digital Analytics tracking links. This step prevents invalid tracking links and ensures that data is captured for your reports when redirects occur.

Example

Incorrect syntax in a tracking URL can invalidate the link.

The following marketing program link is invalid:

http://www.clientsite.com/something.html?this=test?cm_mmc=ven-_-cat-_-pla-_-ite

Because of the second "?" character in this link, the MMC parameters are not correctly parsed.

When the URL contains a query string (such as MMC parameters that are being sent to the new page), it is separated from the page information (in this example, www.clientsite.com/somepage.html) by a question mark. Everything to the right of the question mark is the query string. Within the query string, separate arguments are separated by the ampersand. If the MMC parameters are appended immediately after the first "?", the link tracks correctly:

http://www.clientsite.com/something.html?cm_mmc=ven-_-cat-_-pla-_-ite

Notice that there is no need for an ampersand after the question mark. The question mark already provides separation, so it does not need an ampersand. However, if a link contains multiple arguments, each argument must be separated by an ampersand:

http://www.clientsite.com/something.html?this=test&cm_mmc=ven-_-cat-_-pla-_-ite