The UCP Dashboard is being updated to improve our methodology and reduce the potential for over-counting of consent records, or the unique visitors having given consent, which resulted in less precision in reporting for some customers.*
Why is the dashboard changing?
Each time a user visited a website, UCP collected and sent a record to the server. For example, if a site visitor loaded ten pages, at least ten of these records were collected. Later, UCP processed each of the collected records independently on the server. During this processing, the location for each record was connected to any one of the new or previously created location records that matched. Because there were many possible matches, the first one retrieved was mapped to the record. When reporting occurred, these records were combined using this location ID mapping. Even though the location records may have had identical detail information, it created another matched possible row set, and thus UCP reported more records found than there should have been.
The resolution
To accurately report consent values, both the Unique Site Visitors and the Visitors Requiring Consent (the numerator and the denominator) have been normalized to match and group specifically on the COUNTRY and the STATE-REGION instead of the simple count of the unique number of location record matches. This effectively future-proofs the records from multiplying outside of the explicit geographical criteria matches.
How this impacts you
You don't need to take any action as a result of this fix. You may, however, notice a change in the Total Consent Rate percentage and dashboard numbers generated for the past. In most cases, this number will go down.
*Technical details: This issue is primarily related to the join on the dynamic location table used by our geo-location system. The location records have slowly grown with duplicate matching entries with different nominal IDs and slightly alternate names for different elements (like state, region, city). This is due to the multi-threaded and dynamic nature of the location build process and the way data are added to it each day; making it impossible to prevent some duplication of the records or record matches over time.
