NOTE: If your Link Status shows failure(s) you are still able to process submissions and generate valid URLs.  The Claravine platform does not stop you from creating the URL, the validation failures are a warning for you to validate the page manually.

When you enter a URL into the Link column of the submission table, Claravine will run a series of validation tests based on what your Administrator has designated for this template. These link validation tests are in place to warn you of any errors with the link or webpage coding that may cause a problem for reporting in analytics. Claravine is checking your link prior to campaign launch to reduce loss of data and wasting your time creating links to incorrect pages.

When you enter a URL in the Link column, the spinning wheel in the Link Status column indicates Claravine is actively validating the landing page. After a few moments, the validation results will populate.

Errors

If the Link Status column returns a red warning icon showing some failed validations, hover over the cell to see the warnings.

In this example, google.com is a live page, the Page Exists validation shows a green check mark (pass), however, my company doesn’t have an Adobe Analytics Pixel tags on the page and is not correctly coded for the appropriate Adobe Report Suite as configured on the template and I see the warning icon (fail).

These warnings indicate to you that there could be an error and you should contact your analytics/IT/web team to confirm the webpage has been constructed and tagged correctly.

If all validations tests pass, you’ll see a green checkmark in the Link Status column.

Creating Trackable URLs Prior to Page Publishing

We understand marketing users create trackable URLs for page links that have not been published yet. Claravine link validations will show a failure for Page Exists but this does not invalidate the URL. You can still create your trackable URL prior to the landing page being published without any error.  In this case you would want to manually check and validate the page before your campaign launches.

Other Validation Error Scenarios

There are a few other validation scenarios for you to be aware of, and to know what is going on or how to troubleshoot and understand the reason for the error you’re being shown. Here are some of the other scenarios, but it is not necessarily an exhaustive list, since we’re busy adding more types of validations.

• Claravine Validators have been blocked
• www.domain.com vs domain.com and https:// vs. http://

Claravine Validators have been blocked

If you should receive an error stating that the Claravine Link Validators have been blocked, it means that your company’s web servers have possibly noticed some web traffic coming from our Vadidators and marked it as unwanted Non-Human Traffic (NHT).  In these cases, please reach out to your CSM and they will get you information for you to supply to your IT/Network department to request that they whitelist the IP addresses of the Claravine Validators so that we can properly validate your landing pages for the campaigns you want to run.

Apparent Errors Related to
“www.domain.com” vs “domain.com” and “https://” vs. “http://”

Depending on how your website's SSL Certificate is set up, you may sometimes notice errors that are technically accurate, but at first glance don’t seem to make sense.  Here are a couple of things to watch out for.

While these may appear the same at first glance, they show 4 unique scenarios and the results shown will depend on how your SSL Certificate is configured.

“www.domain.com” vs “domain.com”

• Some SSL Certificates are configured to require the full URL, so if you enter just “yourdomain.com” in Claravine without the “www” subdomain, the validation will show as “failed” for one or more of the validation checks, because technically that page doesn’t exist.  
• This can seem further confusing if you enter the same URL into a browser, and your web page loads.  One reason for this is that some websites are configured to automatically redirect “yourdomain.com” to the proper “www.yourdomain.com”.  The Claravine validator doesn’t follow the redirect, so although the web page is able to load, the Claravine validator hits the redirect, and stops, and it will return an error for the web page exists validation
  
  

“https://” vs “http://”

• Similar to the scenario described above, your SSL Certificate may be configured to require the secure version of your website, so if you enter the URL as “http://www.yourdomain.com” in Claravine instead of “https://www.yourdomain.com”, the validation may show as “failed” for one or more of the validation checks, because the SSL Certificate is set up to require the secure version of the website.
  
  
• One other thing to note is that when entering your URL, if you just type “yourdomain.com” into Claravine, the platform will automatically prepend the URL with “https://”.  So you might run into a validation error when the adjusted URL of https://yourdomain.com is checked by the validation engine.  In most cases it fails because your SSL Certificate is requiring the “www” subdomain also.
  
• BEST PRACTICES:  For the reasons listed above, it is a best practice to navigate to the landing page to which you want to direct traffic, and copy the URL from the address bar of your browser and paste the URL into Claravine.

Login Pages and Cookie Overlays - Common Causes of Validation Errors

Link validation often fails on login pages.  This is because the page requires a login before the site allows processing of the rest of the page.  Similar to this, pages that sit behind a login page, or pages that have an overlay requiring you to accept cookies can also fail the validation process.