Difficulty in matching figures and i'm not sure why

[#1]

Hello people

i'm building a dashboard in Tableau.

This dashboard will show a line graph of visits, a line graph of visitors, a stacked breakdown of visits split by traffic type, e.g, direct, email, etc.  It will also show top pages and i need to be able to split by country.  The country will be extracted from two letters of the url, e,g, en or de.

When i first designed this, i used DW to extract this information and i selected the following dimensions:

Referrer

Referring Domains

Referrer type

Pages

And the following metrics

Visits

Visitors

Other items will be on the dashboard but i have to extract them separately through SiteCatalyst - bounces/entries.

My problem as you probably have deduced is that if i were to look at my visits in SiteCatalyst, they wouldn't match what is in my DW extract and i'm thinking its because of the dimensions i'm pulling alongside?

Any advice?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Dear Angela,

You cannot sum up Visits or Unique Visitors to get the total numbers. It will deduplicate!

Consider you entered a site through a referrer google.com.my/page and visited 5 pages in a single visit. Below is how the Data Warehouse table will look like.

Referrer	Referring Domain	Referrer Type	Page	Page Views	Visits	Unique Visitors
Google.com.my/page	Google.com	Natural Search	A	1	1	1
Google.com.my/page	Google.com	Natural Search	B	1	1	1
Google.com.my/page	Google.com	Natural Search	C	1	1	1
Google.com.my/page	Google.com	Natural Search	D	1	1	1
Google.com.my/page	Google.com	Natural Search	E	1	1	1

In Tableau, if you select the overall numbers, Page Views = 5, Visit = 5 and Unique Visitors = 5. Because it works like pivot and subtotal everything.

In Adobe Analytics, Page Views = 5, Visit = 1 and Unique Visitors = 1.

Only Page Views will/should match.

So, you cannot compare these! If you need accurate report when you club the dimensions, please generate exact Dimension from the Data Warehouse rather than subtotaling it using Tableau.

Thank You!

Arun

[#3]

Hello Angela,

For Summary in Tableau, rather than subtotaling the metrics from the Data Warehouse file you have(More Dimensions), use another file with only one dimension.

Example : For Referrer Summary, download another Data Warehouse file with the dimension Referrer and metrics Visits & Unique Visitors.

Thank You!

Arun

[#4]

HI Arun

Thanks for your response.  I understand what you are saying with regard to how Adobe dedupes the stats.

The only part I misunderstood in your message was

So, you cannot compare these! If you need accurate report when you club the dimensions, please generate exact Dimension from the Data Warehouse rather than subtotaling it using Tableau.

What do you mean by exact dimension?

Angela