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No content is being tracked in your Activation: check the Content Tracking Dates

Updated by Michel from GRIN

Overview

If one Activation is collecting no content at all, while your other Activations pull content normally with the same tags, the cause is usually the Content Tracking Dates rather than the tags or anything the creators did.

GRIN only attributes a post to an Activation while that Activation's tracking window is open. The window opens when the tracking start date has passed. If the start date sits in the future, the window never opens, and no post can be attributed to that Activation no matter what the creators published or which tags they used.

This is easy to miss because GRIN accepts the dates without warning you. The Track to box does not check that the end date comes after the start date, so a window that can never open can be saved without any error on screen.

What you'll need

  • Access to the Activation that is not collecting content.
  • The dates you actually want to track between.

How to check the tracking window

  1. Open the Activation and go to its setup.
  2. Find the Content Tracking Dates field, which holds two boxes labelled Track from and Track to.
  3. Read both dates carefully, including the year. If the Track from date is in the future, or later than the Track to date, the tracking window never opened and that is your cause.
  4. Compare it against an Activation that is working. A healthy Activation has a Track from date that has already passed.

How to correct the dates

There is one quirk in this field that will get in your way. The Track from picker will not offer you any date earlier than the one currently saved, so if the wrong year is in there the calendar refuses every correct date.

  1. Clear the Track from field first. With the field empty the picker stops restricting the calendar.
  2. Pick the correct start date.
  3. Check the Track to date as well, and save.

If you duplicated the Activation, the copy carries the same dates. Check the copy before you publish it, or it will behave the same way.

Content from the affected period is not recovered

Correcting the dates does not pull in the posts you missed. Attribution happens as content is collected, not afterwards, so content published while the window was closed is not back-filled. The same principle is described in why some creator content looks missing.

You can still get those specific posts into the Activation by adding them yourself. Go to the Activation, then Workflow, then Track Progress, hover the creator and choose Add Content. Pick the task, then add both the content file and the post URL, because Apply stays disabled until both are present. The full steps are in tracking tasks in an Activation. This works even on an Activation that is already marked complete.

Two things to keep in mind about content added this way: metrics you enter by hand are captured at that moment and do not keep updating on their own, and this does not change what was tracked automatically.

Related

For how the tracking window is meant to be set in the first place, see creating an Activation, and for the rules GRIN applies when matching a post to an Activation, see content tracking behavior in Activations.