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Digital Platform API - Troubleshooting invalid users

  • Article

To minimize the incidence of invalid users, drop the user sync pixel more frequently and expire old users out of your database after a period of inactivity.

Note

This recommendation only applies to display. For mobile, since user syncing is not a possibility, device IDs will be valid if we have previously seen them coming in through mobile supply requests.

There are several reasons a user ID can be invalid:

  1. If there is a typo in the UID, the user is invalid.
  2. Xandr expires UIDs on a rolling basis such that the users who haven't been seen for the longest period of time are removed from our database to make room for new users. If you upload UIDs that are very old, chances are you will have a high percentage of invalid users in your file. It's a best practice to keep your cookie mapping fresh and match rate high by collecting UIDs as frequently as possible.
  3. If a client syncs a user Xandr has never seen before, Xandr (via getUID) performs a bounce to the page, sets a UID, and returns that UID back to the client. However, Xandr does not yet store the user ID server side until we see the user a second time. Thus, for all the users we've seen only once from a getUID call, when their UIDs are pushed to us server side via the Batch Segment upload, you will see invalid user ID errors. These IDs exist in the user's cookie, but not in our server-side data store.