Different Unique Visitor counts in the same Virtual Report Suite (Admin vs Basic Users)

[MarcosSa2]

Hi everyone,

I’m seeing a strange discrepancy in Unique Visitors when viewing the same dashboard within the same Virtual Report Suite.

Users with different roles are getting different numbers — specifically, Basic Users see around 40K more Unique Visitors than Admins.

Has anyone come across this behavior before? Could this be related to user permissions, data view settings, or something else I might be missing?

I’d really appreciate any ideas or guidance — thank you all for your time and help!

Best,

[EurosIMS]

Hi @MarcosSa2,

There shouldn't be any differences, no. All report suite users should see the same figures.

However, what might be happening (as it's a VRS), is if the report has a segment applied that admins can see but basic users can't. So the admins see the report segmented (& therefore with a lower UV count), but a normal user doesn't. I don't think that would be an issue normally, but as it's a VRS it might work slightly differently for curated v non-curated segments.

If you run a plain report in a standard report suite, do the same differences show? If you start applying segments, or creating basic reports in the VRS, what action causes the difference to start to show?    

[MarcosSa2]

Hi @EurosIMS,

Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply — really appreciate it!

That’s actually the reason I decided to post here: it should work the same way for all users, but it’s not.

To double-check, we tested with two users (one Admin and one Basic). We created a very simple table with Month of Year and Unique Visitors, just to rule out segments or filters.

At first, we thought it could be a cache issue or maybe something related to non-retrospective data updates in Analytics, but we’re still seeing a significant difference between both users.

Any other ideas on what could be causing this?

Thanks again for your help!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I would start by looking at the segments that define the Virtual Report Suite... it sounds like there may be something happening there....  

It might also be related to the permissions on the Basic vs Admin users... while strange (as you would think that Admins have more permissions), I wonder if something has been added to Basic users that wasn't added to your Admins... this could prevent the Admins from being able to see everything?

So I would also compare the permissions side by side in the Admin Console and try to see if you can find anything odd there.