How to efficiently create rules in Audience Stream to handle empty/undefined values

Gold Contributor
Gold Contributor

Where did the Icon go to insert an image??

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/umqq98fkjui5cny/Clipboard02.jpg?dl=0

 

We want to avoid a Visitor Attribute being set when the value is invalid or empty or undefined (according to the documentation on Visitor Stitching, that is dangerous because it may lead to stitching millions of profiles that are actually different people).

 

Right now we create all these seemingly stupid rules just to be "sure". 

 

Is there an easy way to say "set only if not empty string or not undefined"?

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How to efficiently create rules in Audience Stream to handle empty/undefined values

Community Manager
Community Manager

@loldenburg This is a good question and a concept that needs to be clarified in that article. It does appear that the screenshots and examples are inaccurate with regard to the attribute rules and enrichments. We will add this article to our review queue.

The good news is that you do not have to create these rules for every Visitor ID attribute.  The Visitor ID attribute protects itself according to the requirements mentioned in the article:

 

  • A Visitor ID must have at least 3 unique characters AND be at least 6 characters long

 

The Visitor ID attribute will automatically filter out values that do not satisfy that requirement.

 

That being said, the Visitor ID attribute cannot protect against unexpected values that satisfy that requirement. If, for example, you are passing in a value that is not intended to be a real Visitor ID, such as the string "unknown", it will result in unwanted visitor stitching. So it is important to understand how data is coming into UDH. In a case like that you could create an enrichment on the event attribute that unsets any unwanted values.

Hope that helps.

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How to efficiently create rules in Audience Stream to handle empty/undefined values

Gold Contributor
Gold Contributor
Thanks, the question is not only about Visitor IDs, I wrote "Visitor Attributes". How do we most efficiently prevent the usual JS "non-"values like null, undefined, empty string being accidentally regarded as "not empty". Ideally there is one operator that catches them all.

How to efficiently create rules in Audience Stream to handle empty/undefined values

Gold Contributor
Gold Contributor
@TealiumJustin: Did you see my question?

How to efficiently create rules in Audience Stream to handle empty/undefined values

Community Manager
Community Manager

@loldenburg The operator "is not empty" does what you want. I have added the Rule Condition Definitions article to our review queue. We can add examples of each operator for clarification.

Remember to "Accept as Solution" when your question has been answered and to give kudos to helpful replies.

How to efficiently create rules in Audience Stream to handle empty/undefined values

Community Manager
Community Manager

Just another quick follow-up to this...the Visitor ID Attribute article has been updated with details about the requirements for these values.

Remember to "Accept as Solution" when your question has been answered and to give kudos to helpful replies.
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