Expand my Community achievements bar.

Join us for the next Community Q&A Coffee Break on Tuesday April 23, 2024 with Eric Matisoff, Principal Evangelist, Analytics & Data Science, who will join us to discuss all the big news and announcements from Summit 2024!

DTM counts visitor's sessions differently than I expected.

Avatar

Level 1

I was testing DTM's Page Load Rule with the Condition set to Sessions > 1. 

When I test the rule, the rule did not fired even though I revisited the website by closing and reopening a browser tab. 

I checked the session counter in the browser javascript console. It reminded at 1.

_satellite.visitorSessionCount();

Finally, I have to dig deep into satellite's javascript code and find out that DTM tracks sessions by using a browser session cookie.

A browser session cookie only expires when the browser window is closed (technically browser process is closed) and not when a browser tab closes.

That means the sessions are counted differently than Adobe Analytics and Google Analyics . Not only sessions count is different, DTM's new and return visitors condition depends on the sessions count (return visitor are 

Yikes. I cannot use the DTM's Sessions condition, New / Returning visitors condition to drive Page Load Rule.

0 Replies