Tealium Collect Tag & Session ID when first event is utag.view or utag.link

[jerome_shaver]

We recently discovered some events that had visitor IDs but no session IDs. Looking closer at the data, we found that sessions that begin with the execution of a utag.link or utag.view do not have a session ID for that initial transaction. We speculate that this happens because a website user has a web page open in the browser and does not engage with the site for over thirty minutes, but then returns to the page and clicks on a link that executes a utag.link or utag.view function. The net effect is that there are orphaned events that are not aligned with any session ID.

Our guess is that the code that generates the session ID does not execute when the utag.link or utag.view is fired.

If this is true, is there an easy way to force the session id to be regenerated and assigned to the cookie before the utag.link or utag.view functions are executed?

If not, it seems that we might be able to do so manually by checking for the expiration via utag.loader.RC and regenerate it manually using the utag.loader.SC functions. Does this seem doable and / or advisable? Would it cause conflict with what the tealium collect code does for session ID assignment?

Thanks in advance.

[ty_gavin]

Thanks Jerome, great catch.  We'll definitely plan to update the utag.js template to support this.  The target release would be sometime in Q2-2016.

In the short term, you may be to work with a Client Services team member to build a code fix to set/reset the utag_main cookie value for session ID inside a JS Extension.

[ty_gavin · Accepted solution]

@jerome_shaver,

The utag.js 4.40 template releases today which has the fix for this issue.  Please let me know if this resolves the issue.  (Any previous custom code workarounds may need to be removed before trying out the new template.  Also, be sure to test in dev environment before pushing to production.)

Full release notes for utag.js 4.40 are here:

https://community.tealiumiq.com/t5/uTag/utag-js-version-4-40-Release-Notes/ta-p/12946

Thanks again for reporting this issue,

-Ty

[jerome_shaver]

Great, thanks for letting me know.