Join us January 15th for an AMA with Champion Achaia Walton, who will be talking about her article on Event-Based Reporting and Measuring Content Groups!
When applying any type of filter to a report or view, there should be a sub total and a total provided. So if the grand total is 1,000 and we filter out items that are worth 100, then we should see a sub-total or filtered total of 900 as well as a grand total of 1,000. The percentages of each item should be impacted the same way. % of grand total and % of sub total. This should be available on every report and every metric.
I would also recommend that for certain reports like the Site Content >> Site Sections Report that when this report's metrics are set to Visits or Unique Visitors that the total is removed since totalling Visits or Visitors is not accurate. Any Visitors who visit multiple Site Sections will count as a Unique Visitor in each, but only count once in the total. An in-product explanation could possibly be used and replace the Total display.
This has been under review for almost 2 years. It makes discover practically unusable, that one has to pull entire sets of data (often up to the uniques allowed) and sum them over in excel every time. It's ridiculous we have to bounce back and forth between Discover and SiteCatalyst.
It should be always clear which "total" is displayed: it is not the same behavior when filtering the data and when segmenting the data! Many users are confused and do not know what "total" means in the current context.
Total is actually hugely important; it's the only way to get deduped counts in Adobe Analytics. As soon as you do a Unique Visitor (aka Unique User) count of any kind, you quickly discover that in many cases, UU cannot be and should not summed; the only deduped count is that little "total". Yes, it's misleading, it's undocumented, it's calcs are not clearly defined on the screen, even why it appears sometimes and not others, all true... and all good reasons to fix this, initially for total, then later with a subtotal approach per parent request.
