Why am I having problems with link validations?

If your Link Status shows failure(s), you can still 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 runs a series of validation tests based on what your Administrator has designated for this template. These link validation tests exist 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 avoid 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 that 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 and the Page Exists validation shows a green checkmark (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 that there may be an error and you should contact your analytics/IT/web team to confirm that 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 that 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 should manually check and validate the page before your campaign launches.

Other Validation Error Scenarios

There are a few other validation scenarios you should know about for troubleshooting purposes; they are listed here, but it is not necessarily an exhaustive list, because 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 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 provide you the information your IT/Network department will need. Ask your IT/Network team to 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 four unique scenarios and the results shown 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.

Note also that when entering your URL, if you type yourdomain.com into Claravine, the platform will automatically prepend the URL with https://. So you may 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.

For the reasons listed above, it is a best practice to navigate to the landing page where you want to direct traffic, and copy the URL from the address bar of your browser and paste that URL into Claravine.

Common Causes of Validation Errors

Login Pages and Cookie Overlays

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.

Link Validation Fails Due to Cookies

When a site or landing page requires users to accept or configure cookies, marketing tags won’t automatically load onto the page to be verified by Claravine.

While the page verification check will still pass, other common verification checks will fail, such as:

• Pixel Exists
• Correct Report Suite (Adobe)
• Correct Report (Adobe)
• Correct Property (Google)

To help bypass cookie notifications, Claravine uses a unique request header when scanning your landing pages for marketing tags. Your team can use this value to automatically accept cookies and allow Claravine’s tag validation to run and return the proper verification status.

Request Header: 'X-Vendor': 'ClaravineValidator'

Please reach out to your site administrator or to your IT team for assistance in configuring this request header.

Link Validation Suddenly Stops Working Because of Firewall

If link validation has been working for a certain page and it suddenly stops working, it's possible that your website's firewall is blocking our page validations when we attempt to test your link.

If our validator is being blocked, you may see the following error message:

To perform our automated landing page validation, our validator IP address must interact with your landing page for several checks.

To resolve this IP blocking issue your webmaster or network team will need to whitelist the Claravine validator IP address(es) to allow the validation to proceed.  Contact our Support Team to request the information you'll need to convey to your IT Team so they can get it whitelisted.

Your organization could also be partially blocking our validator. The validator always includes the request header 'X-Vendor': 'ClaravineValidator', and your organization may not fire all the pixels due to that header. Please ask your IT Department to allow the above header.

Remember that you can still process submissions and generate valid URLs even if the link validator is being blocked. The Claravine Platform simply can't validate that the page exists and that it is properly tagged for your analytics platform indicated.