Troubleshooting Web Intercepts 🔧

Don't see your web intercept displaying on a certain URL? Doesn't look right? Please follow all these handy steps before contacting us, with the most common ones here at the top. 


1️⃣ 🔛 Is the study turned "on" from inside Ethnio? 

You must have a paid plan to activate a study published as a web intercept. You can upgrade from account >> plan & usage if necessary. Please note if you've exceeded traffic from your plan, you'll receive a message prompting you to upgrade. 


2️⃣ ⚠️ Local & staging servers don't always work  

Are you using a staging or development environment server to test the Ethnio code? Depending on almost infinite variables with your environment, if the intercept doesn't appear or looks strange, and we can't get to a public URL to see if the Ethnio code is placed properly, chances are there is a network security setting prohibiting the Ethnio screener from displaying. Same is true if you are testing on your local machine. 99% of the time that won't work, and we can't support it. This solution is to test on production with the study turned off. Find a corner of your production site you can push Ethnio JS to, and then remember nothing will display until you turn the Ethnio study on, so just do that for a few seconds. Still a responsible way to test. This issue represents 73% of all emails to Ethnio.


3️⃣ 🎯 Targeting: frequently an issue

Turn all targeting off to test your intercept. If you can't seem to get your web intercept to appear, make sure to set every targeting column to "all" just to test things out. Then you can progressively add targeting once you've determined the screener is working. Make sure the word none does not appear under any of the targeting areas, especially Devices. This is a common one. Also keep in mind we use browser strings, which aren't always accurate, so only use targeting if you are okay with cutting down a huge percentage of potential respondents. And remember, you can always filter out people in the "recruits" part of Ethnio later with more accuracy than targeting. Unfortunately, this is just the reality of browser strings.



4️⃣ ⏰ Advanced Delay Setting 

Under Study > Publish > Advanced Settings, make sure the options are set to display "Immediately" and not 5 seconds or more after page load.


5️⃣ 🍪 Cookies 

Remember to clear your cookies or try incognito or a fresh browser. You can place the Ethnio JS on multiple pages, and we set a cookie so nobody sees it twice—so you'll need to clear all Ethnio cookies to be able to see it.



6️⃣ 🧑‍💻 Code Placement and The Exact Ethnio JS 

Check your code placement and make sure it is the same code we generate under study > publish. If you've modified the Ethnio code in any way, we can't support it for free, but can still offer paid support. That means if we view source or run Inspector on your URL, and the Ethnio code looks different in any way from the script below, you'll have to fix that. It should also be as close the bottom of your source code and the closing </body> tag as possible. Make absolutely sure the copy and paste worked from your publish page. So this is basically what it should look like this in your source code:



7️⃣ 🏷️  Tag Managers 

If you're using Google Tag Manager, Ensighten, or any tag manager, you could be intermittently blocking traffic to Ethnio, which is something we support, but that could trick Ethnio into thinking the JS code is intermittently not live. There's nothing actually wrong with that, but keep in mind you might see "code status" inside Ethnio as off while your tag manager is limiting traffic. Lots more info on tag manager compatibility here.


8️⃣ ⏲️ Timer 

Do you have the timer feature "active?" Turn it off to test. Look at the top of your study bar near the on/off indicator and if the timer is highlighted, click on timer, and verify that timer is set to "off." You can then manually change the screener to on or off.



9️⃣ 🚦 Limiter / Auto Shut Off

If you've set a number of responses for the auto shut-off under study > publish >limiter, make sure the number is much bigger than your total responses. It's cumulative, meaning if you have 8 test responses, you'd have to set it to 18 to get 10 new responses. Sincere apologies for the manual math! 🤓



🔟 🔐 Content Security Policies (CSP)

Your site may have a policy in place to prevent any third party iFrame from loading content, which would block Ethnio from working. If you see this type of message instead of the actual Ethnio study content, contact your developers and ask about modifying the CSP to allow Ethnio to function.



More resources

If you or your IT department need further information before you can get full approval for code placement, check out our handy

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