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Troubleshoot: Inaccurate or missing section or author data in your Chartbeat Dashboard or Report

  • Updated

The section and author values you see in the Real-Time Dashboard are not automatically collected by our tracking code; rather, they are defined in your custom Chartbeat code configuration via the _sf_async_config.authors and _sf_async_config.sections variables set up by your analytics team.

If an author or section value is not appearing in your Real-Time or Historical Dashboard as expected, there is likely an issue with the Chartbeat tracking code on one or more of your tracked distribution channels (standard web, AMP, Facebook Instant, or native apps).  If there is no section or author data in your Real-Time or Historical dashboards, then these authors and sections variables have not been configured at all. 

If the sections or authors appearing for a page or group of pages are not accurate in the Real-Time or Historical dashboards, or they appear and disappear in Real-Time, it is likely caused by your unique platforms sending us inconsistent section/author combinations. 

Related: How does Chartbeat handle conflicting section and author implementation?

In order to establish an accurate section/author-to-page data mapping in your Chartbeat tools, it's important to ensure that consistent section and author data is being set for each unique article or landing page across all of your unique platforms being tracked by Chartbeat.

We recommend that the team that manages your tracking configuration start by reviewing your various Chartbeat tracking integrations to see if section/author data is configured accordingly using the table below, and to review the troubleshooting steps at the bottom of this article.

Section and author data should be populated using the following methods across our unique page tracking integrations for webpages, AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and native apps:

Standard Web

_sf_async_config.authors and .sections: Our documentation provides examples of several different methods that can be used to define your section and author variables in your standard web implementation, including page metadata, part of your URL structure, a variable in your CMS, or a data layer/tag manager (e.g. Google, Adobe, Tealium). 
Single Page Web Apps (virtual page change)

sections and authors: We have a separate website implementation for tracking pages that are loaded dynamically without full DOM refresh using our virtualPage function. When calling our virtualPage function to track these page views, new section and author values should be sent to us via the sections and authors variables.

If we are not passed updated section and author information, we’ll continue to register the original sections and authors we received from the previous page.

pSUPERFLY.virtualPage({
      sections: "New Section 1, New Section 2",
      authors: "New Author",
      path: "/newpath",
      title: "New Title"
    }):
Accelerated Mobile Pages

sections and authors: Set the sections and authors data in our AMP integration:

 

<amp-analytics type="chartbeat">
    <script type="application/json">
        {
            "vars": {
                "uid": "12345",
                "domain": "yoursite.com",
                "sections": "section 1, section 2",
                "authors": "author name here"
             }
         }
    </script>
</amp-analytics>
Facebook Instant Articles

Our Facebook Instant Articles integration utilizes our basic web tracking code, so all of the same variables seen above for "Standard Web" are also available for use for this integration.

If you're using a custom metadata field or data layer to populate sections, authors, and content type in your existing Chartbeat code, you will not be able to retrieve these inside the FIA code, as JavaScript cannot be used this way in FIA.
Native iOS & Android Applications

setSections and setAuthors: Pass section and author data for every view you track to ensure consistency between different views.

Call setSections and setAuthors with an array of strings for each before calling trackView.

Any sections and authors you set will stay set until you set a different set of values. If the user is navigating from a view with sections or authors to another view with no applicable sections or authors, you should set the sections or authors to an empty array.

For further assistance with section/author data sent from your mobile apps via our native app SDKs, please contact your Chartbeat Customer Success representative or support@chartbeat.com.

 

Troubleshooting Tips

To determine what platform may be passing us missing or incomplete section or author tags, you can use both real-time and historical tools to determine where this issue is occurring. 

 

Real-Time

If an article is missing section and/or author data in the real-time dashboard, take a look at the Device and Distribution sections the article to see if any particular platform is driving the most traffic at this moment. For example, if the majority of concurrents for a given article page are viewing your AMP page from a mobile device, your analytics team should revisit the Chartbeat tracking configuration for your AMP pages.

 

Advanced Queries

If you have our Advanced Queries tool available on your account, the following historical report will allow you to see what section or author tags have (or have not) been set for a particular article.

  • Start with a metric like pageviews
  • Add "dynamic_section, "device", "distribution", and/or "site_experience" groups to narrow down if missing section/author tags are coming from a particular device, app, or platform like AMP or FBIA
  • Use the Page path filter to pull data for a specific article (Check out our FAQ article with tips on how to use the page path filter.)aq-report-section-author.png

Clicking this link will populate a sample Advanced Queries report that can help you narrow down where the missing or incorrect author/section tags can be found. 

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