500k unique limit not behaving as it should?

[shawn_segundo]

Hoping to get an official "Adobe" answer here as results via Twitter were not too successful, plus this is just too detailed to be accurately articulated in 140 character chunks.  Anyways, the problem comes with an instance I am working on where unique page views for URLs that are well over 500K are not being bucketed in to the "low traffic" category as they should be per this adobe documentation:

Uniques Exceeded (Low-Traffic) Logic

I've attached a screenshot, these URLs all only have 1 view per the month, and are not previously recorded, so these should all be falling into the low bucket traffic, but they are not, and this number continues to grow.  Anyone experienced this before, and if you have, do you have insights on to why the software is behaving as such?

Thanks!

[img]BvoGyeyIgAAQzhS-1.png[/img]

[brian_au · Accepted solution]

Hi Shawn,

The 'Low Traffic' unique limit can vary depending on your company Adobe setting thresholds. I would encourage you to reach directly out to Adobe Customer Care to verify. Also it is typically a good thing that you have not yet reached the 'Low Traffic' (Uniques Exceeded) bucket as it is controlled by an Adobe algorithm and you do not have control of the high cardinality decision logic that runs or to what degree it runs. In other words it may not behave as you hope or expect in the end reports in terms of grouping 'Low Traffic'.

A detailed review of the current handling of high cardinality reports as of Adobe Analytics 15.3 can be found below from feature launch 4/26/12.

http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/high-cardinality-reports/

What is High Cardinality?

For the pur­poses of this blog post, a report has high car­di­nal­ity when a “high num­ber” of dis­tinct val­ues are passed in for given vari­able within a spe­cific time frame. The vari­able may be page name, a prop, an eVar or any other stan­dard or cus­tom Site­Cat­a­lyst report­ing dimen­sion.  So for instance, if you pass in mil­lions of page names into Site­Cat­a­lyst each month, the page name vari­able has high car­di­nal­ity. If you pass in mil­lions of search terms via a Cus­tom Traf­fic Vari­able (prop) each month, that vari­able also has high car­di­nal­ity. There’s no spe­cific line in the sand where a vari­able becomes highly car­di­nal per se, but for his­tor­i­cal rea­sons we’ll state that any time a vari­able has more than 500,000 unique val­ues in a month, the vari­able has high cardinality.

Best,

Brian