How does Adobe Analytics cope with unauthenticated and authenticated server calls within a session and over different sessions?
For this particular case I'd like to know what happens when setting s.visitorID variable (enabling vid parameter) and what Adobe Analytics counts as a unique visitor when s.visitorID cannot be set and Adobe falls back to mid as the identifier.
From this page it is pretty clear the within a session unauthenticated hits and subsequent authenticated hits are counted as two different sessions and unique vistiors:
https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/sc/implement/variable_persistence.html
"When an un-authenticated customer first arrives at your site, that customer is assigned a visitor profile by Adobe Analytics. As shown in Unique Visitor and Visits Counts, on authentication a new profile is created. When the new profile is created, one visit ends and another visit starts."
Example Visit
Following the "example visit" link is a little bit confusing since the authenticated hits from the laptop (last two rows in the table) are added up (9) to the number of visits from the unauthenticated visit hits (8). What happens here?
And how is setting s.visitorID variable different from using the 'unique visitor variable' option in UI where you can set it to an evar? Also when this evar is set to 'never expire' will this tie unauthenticated hits back to the same user ID once the evar is collected in a hit?
Thank already.