Using Unique Visitors Metric in AA vs. People Metric in CJA

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Identifying Unique Visitors (AA) vs People (CJA)

The ‘Unique Visitors’ metric shows the number of Visitor IDs for the dimension item. As there are several ways to identify Unique Visitors, the following table lists the ways a visitor is identified:

Order Used	Query Parameter (collection method)	Present When
1	vid	The visitorID variable is set.
2	aid	Visitor has an existing s_vi cookie. Set on implementations without or prior to implementing the Visitor ID service.
3	mid	Visitor has an existing s_ecid cookie. Set on implementations using the Adobe Experience Cloud Identity service.
4	fid	Visitor has an existing s_fid cookie, or if aid and mid could not be set for any reason.
5	IP Address, User Agent, Gateway IP Address	Last resort to identify a unique visitor if the visitor’s browser does not accept cookies.

In contrast, CJA expands the concepts of identities beyond ECIDs to include any ID you want to use, including:

1. Customer ID
2. Cookie ID
3. Stitched ID
4. User ID
5. Tracking Code

Visitor ID vs. Person ID Data

Customer Journey Analytics allows you to combine datasets with similar Person IDs and attribution is carried over across devices and channels, which creates a seamless combination of multiple datasets. CJA can measure how often visitors begin a task on a mobile device and then later move to a desktop PC to complete the task, whereas measuring this same user behavior in traditional Adobe Analytics would impact the count of Unique Visitors. For instance, in AA, the same person browsing your site on different devices would result in a separate Unique Visitor that is counted per device, rendering deduplicated results for this specific use case.

For instance, when analyzing an identical in AA versus CJA for the same date range, we see distinctly different values in the count of Unique Visitors versus People, as shown below:

Furthermore, when breaking down the Page by the Visitor ID in AA, we see that it results in more than 1 Unique Visitor per Visitor ID. In contrast, breaking down the Page by the Person ID in CJA, we see 1 visitor per Person ID, due to the solution’s cross-stitching capabilities.