Entries for entry page report vs entries for referring domains report do not match

[alev1]

Hi, I'm a little bit confused when comparing the entries for the "Entry page" report and the entries for the "Original referring domain" and "Referring domain" report.

The weird thing is: I have lot more entries (~25%) in both the original referring domains report and the entry page report than in the referring domains report. Shouldn't the numbers match in all three reports?! A user doesn't "enter" twice during a session in my understanding.

Instances and visits do not match either for the referring domains report.

I'm refferring to the total values, I didn't count the individual items.

All settings/segments are the same for the two reports of course.

[Hyder_Ziaee]

Hey AleV,

Can you Share what exact reports you are running and what metrics you have applied to each report? Would help understand the issue you have.

[teknopointindia · Accepted solution]

No the numbers will not match. 

Entries metric is first recorded value of a visit for a particular variable 

In Entry page Entries Metric represents Pages and in case of referring domain represent first value of referring domain 

So Entries metric for Page will get incremented irrespective of wether source is direct or via some other domain. 

And Original referring domain is the value of RD in first visit which remains same for all subsequent visits.  

So Entries metric credit in case of ORD will go to the same value for all subsequent visits. 

I am describing each below

What is Entries Metric ? 

First recorded value in a visit for a variable.  

Example - first page of the visit - In Pages report Entries metric will be incremented for the first page of the visit. 

What is Instances Metric? 

Count of how many times a variable had a particular value 

What is Visit  ?

Starts with first page  and Times out after 30 mins of Inactivity with inactivity defined as no new image request sent to Adobe Server

What is referring domain ?

Source of traffic for a particular visit   ,  so while the user is engaging with the website and visit has not timed out and he comes via some other source or same source again, 

this time only the instance metric is incremented but not the Visit as the visit is still not timed out. 

Hence Instance > Visits 

With same logic - Entries is incremented only once in a visit . 

What is Original Referring domain ? 

Orignal Referring domain is the source from which the user came to the website the first time.  All conversions in subsequent visits is credited to the ORD in the ORD report Vs to specific RD in the RD report. 

Visit 1

RD - Google   ORD - Google

Visit 2 

RD - Face book  ORD - Google

Visit 3 

RD - Typed / Book Mark    , ORD - Google

Hope this helps 

~Himanshu Mody