Overview
A false positive is receiving a notification that a tag is missing from your site when it is not. False positives in an ObservePoint report can be verified by manually going to a page and checking the status of the tag. For example, if a report in ObservePoint says you are missing an Adobe Analytics tags for a page, manually go to the URL it indicates, open the OP debugger and see if it shows the tag loading. If it does, then you may be getting a false positive.
Diagnosis
False positives can be due to a variety of reasons. Here are some factors to take into account when diagnosing why your report returned a false positive:
Q: Did the page load correctly?
If the page did not load, then the tags will be reported as missing because the tags cannot load without the page.
Q: Was the site down during the ObservePoint audit?
If the site was down during an ObservePoint audit this would also cause the tags to not load. This is not as common an occurrence, but could happen if the audit was run during site maintenance or heavy server load.
Q: Is there mixed content on the page?
If there is mixed content present, this causes a variety of issues. Mixed content means there is both secured and unsecured content in the form of images, links, videos, and scripts. Compared to a manual check, the ObservePoint engines will respond differently in the situation that there are unsecured scripts being loaded on a secure page. The unsecured script often blocks the loading of certain tags in the ObservePoint engines during an audit, but not on a manual check. Depending on the browser, if there is unsecured content present, it may not disable unsecured scripts and this could prevent the firing of other tags. For more information see the Unsecured Content help document for a custom OP tag that can be used to locate mixed content pages.
Q: Is there cross origin content present?
If there is cross origin content on the page this could also block the loading of tags. Cross origin content means that the page loads a resource from a different primary domain. In addition the content could be blocked even if the cross origin content normally works when manually loading the page. If the connection is slow, this would hinder the tag from loading, hence the false positive.
Q: Does the audit/journey work after a re-run?
If the tag appears in the audit/journeys after a re-run, there are several reasons why this could have happened:
- previously, the page did not load correctly. In this case, adding some extra wait time could help in order to ensure that there is sufficient time for the page to load completely.
- at the time the audit ran, there was an issue on that page and the tag was indeed missing.
Note: If after the re-run the tag is present both in the browser and in the audit/journey, it is very hard to test and determine the exact reasons why the tag was missing in a previous run.