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brianjherbert
Level 2
October 16, 2015
Solved

Visitor ID in Debugger is Different from Data Wharehouse

  • October 16, 2015
  • 11 replies
  • 5176 views

Hi,

I am trying to find out my own traffic by comparing the Visitor ID that is being sent to me via the debugger with the Visitor ID being recorded in Omniture. It looks like there is some sort of conversion that is happening though. All the Omniture data is numeric (with an underscore) while the debugger is alpha-numeric (with a hyphen).  Any idea how to get these number to match, or is there another method to see the paths of unique visitors?

Any help would be appretiated!

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Best answer by TanmayMathur

Hi,

Apologies for a delayed response.

The different numbers you are seeing is the conversion of the visitor id from base 16 to base 10. This is done to save long strings of data. This article should explain it - https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/kb/en_US/analytics/kb/visitor-id-populated.html

Let me know if you have further questions.

TM

11 replies

TanmayMathur
Adobe Employee
TanmayMathurAdobe EmployeeAccepted solution
Adobe Employee
October 16, 2015

Hi,

Apologies for a delayed response.

The different numbers you are seeing is the conversion of the visitor id from base 16 to base 10. This is done to save long strings of data. This article should explain it - https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/kb/en_US/analytics/kb/visitor-id-populated.html

Let me know if you have further questions.

TM

brianjherbert
Level 2
October 16, 2015

Bump

brianjherbert
Level 2
October 16, 2015

Hi thanks for the response,

This does help a little, but I am still having trouble matching what I see in the debugger to the site analytics code even after I do the base 16 to base 10 conversion (although it does look closer).

The s_vi variable referenced in the help document you sent is not set in the cookie, only the s_fid variable (which matches the debugger visitor id) is set and looks like two hyphenated hexidecimal numbers. I did a convertion using the PHP function base_convert(), but the numbers still don't match.

Is this hex to decimal conversion to true for all the possible visitor id's stored?

B

TanmayMathur
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 16, 2015

Hi, 

Could you give us a example set of the numbers you are seeing in the image request and the corresponding number inside Reports & Analytics? We can have a look at it. 

Thanks!

TM

brianjherbert
Level 2
October 16, 2015

Visitor ID from Adobe Debugger: 7DF9AD800CC34CF4-1CCFB79BD8147D0F

COOKIE s_fid = 7DF9AD800CC34CF4-1CCFB79BD8147D0F

 

PHP CODE:

baseconvert'7DF9AD800CC34CF4',16,10).'_'.str_baseconvert('1CCFB79BD8147D0F',16,10)   //convert base 16 to base 10

returns: 9077477289423492268_2076079833214123204

str_baseconvert'7DF9AD800CC34CF4',16,10).'_'.str_baseconvert('1CCFB79BD8147D0F',16,10)  //convert base 16 to base 10 (more precision)
returns: 9077477289423490292_2076079833214123279

Neither of these returned numbers is part of the dataset for visitor id in the data warehouse.

warrensander
Level 6
October 16, 2015

use a prop, save the visitor id (s_vi) cookie value in it. then in your data warehouse request put the s_vi cookie now you have the same data in the same format to look at.

brianjherbert
Level 2
October 16, 2015

I'd like to use the data that is provided me without having to do any of this kind of coding. I SHOULD be able to use the id's from the system to do the tracking, I am not sure why they just don't do the hex->dec conversion up front in the first place so it's the same across the board.

brianjherbert
Level 2
October 16, 2015

TanmayM, Is there any other insight you can provide?

Level 2
August 30, 2019

Hi tanmaym7102255​,

just stumbled over your response.

Unfortunately, the link you added way back does not work anymore.

We're having the same issue. having s_vi cookie data which does not match the Visitor ID in Analytics.

Is this actually a base 16 to base 10 conversion? So you could just use the parts separated by the dash and convert them into a number or string with either .toString() or Number.parseInt()?

Cheers,

Björn

Pablo_Childe
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
September 3, 2019

Hi i recommend using the Marketing ID.

What is the Marketing Cloud ID Service (MCID)?

I find its a more robust variable and all users automatically have it generated and saved for them. Allows for some very powerful segmentation building.

Also a little caveat I find trips up people is trying to do post analysis in lets say excel.. be careful when trying to open files with the data as the data gets truncated.

good luck to you