1:4 ratio for customer id and unique visitors in app

[Shaurabh]

Hi,

We are getting the unique visitor count via Apps is 4 times higher than the Customer ID count. which means each unique Customer is being counted as 4 unique visitors. Ideally it should be 1:1 until a user reinstalled the app.
Any advice would be useful here. 

[yuhuisg]

Over the time period that you used with that freeform table, were there new versions of your app? If so, I believe new app versions will cause the Experience Cloud ID Service to reset its ID for identifying visitors. If that is correct, then that will "inflate" the number of unique visitors.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

We release new versions of our apps every 2 weeks.. I can guarantee that the Visitor Id is not reset when that happens....

However, I did notice a small subset of users who recorded as 2 UVs on 1 MID value...  I am not sure what is causing that yet.. but if I figure it out I will let you know what I find....

[yuhuisg]

@Jennifer_Dungan thanks for clarifying that new app versions don't result in new ECIDs for the same devices. I thought I had read somewhere that that happens, but I guess I had read wrongly.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Users will get a new ECID if they delete the app and re-install it.... maybe that is what you saw @yuhuisg?

Now, I am looking again... @Shaurabh the Distinct Customer ID that you are looking at... is this an internal customer id that is tied to your system? Could this be because users have multiple devices that they are logging into? Or is that just the ECID as a Customer ID?

[yuhuisg]

@Jennifer_Dungan yeah, that's probably what I saw: re-installations.

[Shaurabh]

@Jennifer_Dungan thanks for looking into this. Yes those are internal customer ids tied. We are seeing  multiple instances against same device:

[Jennifer_Dungan]

So it looks like those users own multiple devices and are logging into your app from different devices... just like Unique Visitor metric on your website, every browser will identify as a different "UV" (since cookies aren't shared between browsers.. and if that user access from a work computer, personal desktop, personal laptop, phone, tablet, etc.. each of those methods of accessing the site are separate "Unique Visitors".

This really isn't unexpected to be honest.... most people have multiple  devices, and often access from multiple places.

If you have access to Adobe's device graph functionality, I believe this is part of AA Ultimate package or part of CJA... it has a "people" metric that can stitch users across devices to register as a single "person".... (I don't have this, but definitely want it).

The term Unique Visitor really should be renamed, but it's too ingrained in terminology right now... but really, think of UVs more like "Unique Devices" or "Unique Access Points"

[Shaurabh]

Thanks @Jennifer_Dungan , but if you see screenshot above (for 1st row of each device type breakdown), for e.g "Oppo A55" we are seeing 61 UV against 1 Customer ID. In single month its hard to believe that much re-installations.

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Could these be from your internal QA and Developers testing the app? I get data like that from my team (and technically myself for UATing) since we are constantly uninstalling and re-installing the app (we both update and full delete). Particularly when we have to move from Dev build to Prod build.... as some of the settings get messed up if we attempt to upgrade between build types.....

It's for this reason I try to encourage most testing to be done on our Dev builds which are connected to a Dev suite. It should be noted, even when a mobile device is being used on an internal VPN, your don't see those IPs from the testing device, but you still get the mobile devices network IP... so your internal IP filters won't work.... of course, the Prod builds still have to be tested, so we always get a some testing data into our suite that I can't rid of....