In SAS Customer Experience Targeting, when you use the lookup table to search for an IP address during the normalization-of-data process, the IP address is translated at that time into information about the location of the user.

The lookup table changes frequently because Internet service providers (ISPs) re-assign IP addresses constantly. For example, an address that is assigned to Chicago today might be assigned to Los Angeles next week. Therefore, SAS Customer Experience Targeting stores the location of a visitor in the GEO_IP_DIM dimension table and assigns a new key for each combination of the parameters latitude (LAT=), longitude (LONG=), country code (COUNTRY_CD), state and region code (STATE_REGION_CD=), and city name (CITY_NM=). Because the organization name (ORGANIZATION_NM=) is not part of the primary key, a session might be assigned to the incorrect organization.

For example, suppose you have session 1, which contains the following values:

lat=1
long=1
country_cd=US
ctate_region_cd=NC
city_nm=Cary
organization_nm=SAS Institute Inc.

In this case, SAS Customer Experience Analytics creates a record in the GEO_IP_DIM table and stores the appropriate GEO_IP_SK values to the SESSION_FACT table, showing that this session is from someone in Cary, NC and the organization is SAS Institute Inc..

Then, you have session 2, which comes with a different IP address. Session 2 has the following values:

lat=1
long=1
country_cd=US
state_region_cd=NC
city_nm=Cary
organization_nm=Red Hat

Because the lookup (unique key) is based only on the first five values (not including the value for ORGANIZATION_NM=), SAS Customer Experience Analytics does not create a new record in GEO_IP_DIM. Instead, it reuses the existing record from session 1. As a result, the organization value for session 2 is incorrectly assigned as SAS Institute Inc. rather than Red Hat.

Click the Hot Fix tab in this note to access the hot fix for this issue.

Operating System and Release Information

A fix for this issue for SAS Customer Experience Targeting Server 6.3 is available at: