Content Type visits do not match up with total visits

[breb30185739]

Hello All, 

I am wondering why when I break it out by content type, that my content type visits do not match up with my total visits. My when I add up the total content type visits, they are higher than what my daily visits say. 

Any help with understanding this would be greatly appreciated! 

[jeff_bloomer]

This is one of those types of metrics where I tell the analyst to REMOVE the totals, because you should not be using them here.

First think about a Visit anyway.  How useful is a VISIT in the grand scheme of your metrics?  A person walks in and out of your store... OK, next!

What you REALLY need to be thinking about is CONVERSION events. Visits are your launchpad, but don't get wrapped around the axle on visits.  You've got crossover happening on your visits from one type to the next, which is why they're adding up to be more than the sum total of what you're seeing.  In these tables, I do TWO THINGS ALWAYS:

1. REMOVE Percents - They are almost always meaningless to your audience unless you have a HIGHLY relevant and short list of items you're summing up.
2. REMOVE the Grand Total - again, unless you have a very good reason to total things, you don't need it, because more often than not, like now, it's going to cause more confusion than it helps.

[jeff_bloomer]

OK, so I would SWEAR, I just answered this, but I don't see my reply.  So if you get this twice, I will apologize now.

Here's what I tried to say the first time.  Think about what what you're dealing with first of all.  When you're talking about Visits, you're talking about a fundamental metric.

Essentially, in the retail world, I've just walked in and out of your store.  So what?  Big deal!  Nothing happened.  I can visit a store all day and do absolutely nothing.  That's boring.

Let's talk about CONVERSION metrics.  Now THOSE are COOL!!!  You get my drift?

Meanwhile, here's what I tell other analysts. The reason you're seeing a higher value is because there's CROSSOVER in your visits.  You can't add up visits from line to line.  So, the first thing you need to is this:

Unless you're doing extremely relevant Sum Totals of numeric values where it makes sense to have these in place, then ALWAYS remove the percents and Grand Totals, because they will create confusion for both you, the audience, and any junior analysts you have in your organization.  Adobe Analytics is not for the faint of heart, and I do not recommend using Visits for much more than low-level gauge for what's happening on your site.

Make sure you have EVENTS tied to your EVARS and your Workspace reports will start delivering you VALUE IN SPADES!

[igorm75245240 · Accepted solution]

Hi!

The reason the values doesn't match is quite simple. Here's an example to make it easier to understand:

Suppose you're a user and just visited the retail site X on April 1st and you went to these specific pages:

homepage > jeans > t-shirt 

When you create a report in Adobe here's what you're going to see:

Total number of users: 1

Total number of visits (session):  1

If you do a breakdown of page type by visits you're going to see the following:

homepage: 1

jeans: 1

t-shirt: 1

If you sum the values you're going to have 3 sessions, which is incorrect, because we just had one visit. What happens is that Adobe will always try to attribute visits and visitors to the page type or content type so you know which are the sections of your site that has most visits. Adobe is clever and when it aggregates the data it will do deduplication removing all the duplicated metrics.

That's the reason that the values don't match. If you want more information you can visit this section:

https://helpx.adobe.com/analytics/kb/sum-line-items-different-from-total.html

Hope that I could help 

[H_L]

Have you tried other dimensions to breakdown? It seems some of your visits didn't belongs to any of your breakdown: content type [p7].

See you get 41.6K visits in total, but only 41.1K visited at least one of the listed "content type[p7]".

If you try to sum-up all sub-items listed in "content type", you will get 42.4K visits, which means the "total visits": 41.1K is the one already unique in "visit" level under "content type".

So, there are about 0.5K visits to somewhere else on your website but not belongs to listed content type[p7], check your tracking code implementation or any pages / type of pages not fire the "content type[p7]".

[jeff_bloomer]

That's what I was talking about when I mentioned the crossover. You're not seeing a UNIQUE representation of your visit numbers across your content type, which is why I don't recommend the Grand Totals on these kinds of displays. They just create more confusion. igorm75245240 is 100% correct in his illustration and took it further than I did in my explanation, but you can see why this gets so confusing so quickly. Deduplication is the key here, and it is why, more often than not, why you will need to remove Grand Totals and Percents from your tables. I need to get better about providing the "whys". I've just gotten a little more 'cynical' in my years of doing this, so thanks to igorm75245240 for providing the extra context.

[jantzen_b]

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