Fixing Analytics Breakdown from Reserved Keyword Conflicts

The Swedish auction marketplace faced another analytics crisis just months after resolving their first major issue:

• Unassigned Traffic Returns: Traffic attribution suddenly degraded from 2% to 35% unassigned within 72 hours
• New Feature Deployment: Issue coincided with launching product recommendation tracking with custom events
• Marketing Budget at Risk: Over 300K EUR monthly advertising spend couldn't be properly attributed
• Black Friday Approaching: Critical sales period starting in 3 weeks requiring accurate campaign tracking
• Team Confidence Shaken: Second major analytics issue in short timeframe created doubt in platform reliability
• Staging Worked Fine: Issue only manifested in production, making troubleshooting more complex
• Custom Dimensions Not Populating: Newly implemented tracking dimensions showing as not set in reports

Quick resolution needed before peak sales season:

• Rapid Diagnosis: Identify root cause within one week
• Restore Attribution: Return unassigned traffic to under 2% threshold
• Preserve Previous Fixes: Maintain event sequencing improvements from earlier resolution
• Prevent Future Issues: Implement validation to catch similar problems during development
• Documentation: Create implementation guidelines for development team
• Campaign Readiness: Ensure analytics fully operational before Black Friday campaigns launch

The client was understandably frustrated having recently invested in fixing their analytics. The symptoms appeared similar to the previous issue but the root cause was different. After investigation, we discovered the development team had unknowingly used platform reserved keywords when naming their custom dimensions. These keywords have special meaning in the analytics platform and override standard attribution logic. When the custom dimensions contained empty values, the platform couldn't properly attribute traffic sources, resulting in the massive increase in unassigned traffic.

We executed a focused three-week resolution:

Week 1: Investigation & Root Cause

• Analyzed deployment timeline to correlate with traffic attribution degradation
• Examined new custom event implementation and dimension definitions
• Discovered dimension names conflicted with platform reserved keywords
• Confirmed these reserved names were causing attribution override behavior
• Validated that empty dimension values resulted in unassigned traffic classification

Week 2: Implementation & Testing

• Renamed all conflicting custom dimensions to platform-compliant alternatives
• Updated analytics configuration with corrected dimension names
• Modified frontend implementation to use new parameter names
• Created validation script to check for reserved keyword conflicts
• Implemented automated testing for dimension naming conventions
• Deployed fix with gradual rollout strategy to verify effectiveness

Week 3: Validation & Prevention

• Monitored unassigned traffic metrics dropping from 35% to 1.5% within 24 hours
• Verified all custom dimensions populating correctly in analytics reports
• Integrated reserved keyword validation into development pipeline
• Created comprehensive documentation of platform naming restrictions
• Trained development team on analytics best practices and common pitfalls
• Established pre-deployment checklist for analytics implementations