Cause and solution for Administrators of Unica NetTracker or Affinium NetInsight

16th April 2009 - Google is in the process of changing how URLs are displayed - this could impact some features within Unica NetTracker and Affinium NetInsight products of all versions. This page describes the cause and resolution of this problem.

Audience

This page is provided primarily as a resource for customers of SCL and should be read by people responsible for maintaining on-premise installations of Unica NetTracker and NetInsight.

Cause

Google is in the process of making changes to how URL"s are structured in the main search results, URLs that look like:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Will change to:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&
amp;rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig
2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

These URLs are presented to a web site by the web browser as the referrer.

For more information regarding this please see: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/upcoming-change-to-googlecom-search.html

Impact

Based on the default configuration of Unica NetTracker and Unica Affinium NetInsight there is no impact to the correct identification of Referrers as this is based on referrer strings that contain "google."

There is an impact on the identification of Keywords used by visitors as the Keyword extraction rule specifically excludes URLs that contain "/url?".

This rule is present in all current versions and many (if not all) previous versions of the software.

In addition, regardless of the above it would also seem that keywords on the keyword summary are no longer clickable. While this may be used by some people it is of limited value (as there is more and more evidence that Google results are increasingly personalized.). This is fixable but is not discussed on this page. If you would like further information please contact us.

Solution

In order that your profiles continue to work without interruption that exclusion rule should be removed from your profile configuration.

The following changes should only be made by people with authority within their organizations to do so and only after they have satisfied themselves that the change is appropriate to their installations.

While we have tested the removal of this rule on various datasets an observed no negative implications we are unable to guarantee that there will never be any adverse impact as a result of this change. You may wish to test this on a non-production profile in advance of making the change to a live profile.

1. From the browser interface, on the "Options" screen, select "Keywords" from the "Marketing" menu.
If you don"t see this option please contact your Administrator or, if you are the administrator then please contact us.
2. Highlight the "Google" row and click the "Excluded URLs" button.

3. Highlight the "Contains /url?" row and click the "Delete" button.

4. On the ‘Profile options have been saved’ screen click the ‘Continue’ button.

No further changes should be necessary - your normal update process should remain unchanged.
There should be no need to reprocess historical data as this Google change is only just taking effect. If this change to NetInsight is delayed then reprocessing may be required to avoid any discontinuity. This is a fairly simple per-profile configuration change, however if you have questions please contact us.