I've watched teams burn weeks tracking down corrupted data trends because they auto-merged a rebrand and didn't catch it, so yea that's a real gotcha moment waiting to happen. one thing , numeric IDs are pretty rock-solid but they're not actually forever like facebook did some ID recycling back in the pre 2010 days, so it's smarter to treat them as your gold standard but only within a reasonable time window - keeps your historical data safer for those long-term analyses. One more thing, tracking parameters like mibextid and rdid are pretty recent additions , we're talking 2023-2024 timeframe, and a lot of older canonicalization scripts just don't know about them, so you'll want to refresh that strip-list quarterly to stay ahead of things. This should honestly be required reading for anyone working with this stuff, the whole don't guess, just surface the unknowns principle is exactly the right call
I've watched teams burn weeks tracking down corrupted data trends because they auto-merged a rebrand and didn't catch it, so yea that's a real gotcha moment waiting to happen. one thing , numeric IDs are pretty rock-solid but they're not actually forever like facebook did some ID recycling back in the pre 2010 days, so it's smarter to treat them as your gold standard but only within a reasonable time window - keeps your historical data safer for those long-term analyses. One more thing, tracking parameters like mibextid and rdid are pretty recent additions , we're talking 2023-2024 timeframe, and a lot of older canonicalization scripts just don't know about them, so you'll want to refresh that strip-list quarterly to stay ahead of things. This should honestly be required reading for anyone working with this stuff, the whole don't guess, just surface the unknowns principle is exactly the right call