Duplicated Tracking

Overview

If you arrived here from a Duplicated Tracking warning/notification message in your dashboard, no worries, you are in the right place!

That message is just alerting you that SegMetrics has detected an abnormally high number of "alternate" or "duplicate" contacts. This means one user/email is being associated with multiple other users with different emails.

In certain scenarios, when the SegMetrics pixel is applied universally, it can end up on an internal login page. We see the most is when there’s a page that your employees use to log into an internal software. Our pixel will pick up their email and IP address and when this happens multiple times with multiple emails you can get anywhere from dozens to hundreds of alternate contacts created.

Example

Below is an example of what happens when several users are logging in or entering customer emails/info on the same computer. Each of those contacts has different tracking behaviors even though they are most likely the same person. This creates a confusing web of tracking data that becomes very difficult to untangle and can throw off attribution.

Solution One: Removing Pixel From Page

There are a few ways to fix this. The easiest and simplest fix is to not put the tracking pixel on any internal pages. If it is not a customer facing page, make sure our tracking pixel is NOT on it. You can check to make sure the pixel isn’t on it using our debugger tool, more info on that can be found here.

Solution Two: Using The Exclusion Parameter

The Second way to address this is slightly more complex. Its necessary when your page is both internal and external facing. This means both new customers and internal employees use the same page to login. When this occurs you will want to use the exclusion parameters we’ve built for our tracking pixel. Before logging in your internal user simply has to add ?seg-pixel=disable at the end of the URL at the top of the page. You can find those exclusion parameters and more information about them here.

Questions:

1. How do I know which solution to use?

It depends on the scenario you have in front of you. Ideally, best practice is you dont have new customers and internal users logging in on the same form and page. If you don’t have this issue then the first solution is the easiest and most effective. If you do have the above situation, no worries it can still be addressed with solution two.

2. How do I add the SegMetrics tracking pixel to my pages?

You can find some helpful info on installing our tracking pixel in this article here

3. How do I fix my alternate contact mess?

You can write into our support (help@segmetrics.io) and give them any one of the emails you see attached to alternate contacts. Our devs will be able to untangle and “de-attach” them for you.You may repeat these steps for any batches of alternate contacts you find greater than 3.

Under normal circumstances linking alternate contacts is a great way for SegMetrics to tell you two people are the same even when they use different email addresses, so we dont want to get rid of all alternative contacts.