Adobe Site Catalyst capturing success with events vs PageViews

[#1]

In our website which uses adobe analytics, we have a functionality where user submits a service request. When he submits the request, the pageName that we sent is "myapp:service-request-submitted". We are also capturing this in an event say event6. Each time the user submits the service request as per my understanding, the "Occurrence" or "PageViews" should increase by "1" right? The same should happen with event count also. Is this assumption correct?

But unfortunately, when I checked the report suite, there is a big difference in these numbers. PageViews is much higher than (30% more) event6 count.

Is there any logical reason for this behavior? Or my understanding of events and pageView count calculation is not correct?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Yes your understanding is correct.

Everytime the page would load, because it would fire an s.t() call with the event, that pageview for that Page would increment by 1 and event count would be incremented by 1 as well.

However, when you run the Page report with pageview and that event as the metric, numbers for both won't match because Pages are credited based on Linear allocation as far as customer events go.

For an ex:

Let us say a Visitor comes to you site and visits Page A> Page B> Page C> myapp:service-request-submitted page (page loads including event6).

For the above visit, the page 'myapp:service-request-submitted page' would get 1 pageview, however, only 0.25 credit for event6 because 4 page participated thus, 1/4=0.25 credit to each page.

If the same visit is repeated 3 time more, then your report would show, 4 page view and 1 event6 for that Page.

You can read more about it here: Pages

Hope this helps.

[#3]

You are firing the event correctly i.e. the server call right after that action/success takes place. However, yes, the credit of the event give is by default on Linear basis and thus would be divided between all pages viewed within that Visit before that event was fired.

This logic is in place so that you can see influence of each page towards any conversion.

You should only require exact allocation, if you have same event firing on multiple location and you want to know which page is most popular as far as that event/conversion is concerned. Within reporting there are different ways to view the data this way i.e. exact allocation. You run the report either in Ad Hoc Analysis (it offer different versions of same metric per allocation) or you can also create a calculated metric with just that event in the formula and choose your desired allocation method and then use that metric in the Pages report within R&A.

P.S: If a particular event is only being fired on 1 unique location, there shouldn't be a need to get exact allocation data because as an Administrator, you'd know which page this event is being fired on. For an ex: As an administrator, I'd know that my 'event1' represents 'successful registration' and is only fired on the 'Registration Confirmation' page and if I do run the Pages report with 'event1' metric based on exact allocation, all the 'event1' instances would show against the 'Registration Confirmation' page only.

[#4]

Then how does the login success event work? Let's say I have the login page and the post login page. In the post login page I fire "event2". Does it gives only 0.5 credit if I include it only in the post login page? Whats' the right way to fire the event? Should it be in both login and post login?

[#5]

It's because both Linear and participation allocation work for within a Visit i.e. credit for the event is distributed to all the pages that the visitor saw during that Visit before the event triggered.

In my example: Page A is where the visit started and went until the request submitted page i.e. 4 page were viewed during my visit when the event fired.

[#6]

Thanks Abhijeet.

To summarize if we have to capture the number of Submissions, PageView is the right figure to go by rather than using events. Use events in cases where we have a set of activities, which lead to a single success (fire the same event for each of the activity).

Just one more follow up question - How does Site catalyst understand that these are the pages that should be tied to the same event? For example you told about Page A> Page B> Page C> myapp:service-request-submitted page. How did site catalyst know that it has to start from Page A. A user would have accessed multiples pages before accessing Page A