For some time now I’ve been getting more than expected internal traffic in my last touch marketing channels reports. On an average week we get about 9%-10% of our traffic from ‘internal’. We do have 5 international sites (language/country specific), all of which are linked together via a footer link, and are included in our internal URL filters. But I have a hard time believing that we getting a tenth of our visitors are moving between sites. I believe I have followed best practices (screen grab below) on setting up my processing rules.
Anyone see an issue with my processing rules or any ideas on why I would see such a large share of my categorized as internal?
[img]processing rules.png[/img]
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Hi Jay,
The below Laura Chase Adobe Marketing blog post is a great guide to troubleshoot Session Refresh (Internal Traffic):
To review since last-touch Session Refresh (Internal Traffic) with no overwrite can only occur if it was also the first-touch, the below scenarios explain how Session Refresh could be a first-touch channel. I would recommend looking into how/if the below is occurring to inform if the Processing Rule needs further refinement or to be broke out into additional sub-rules:
• Scenario 1: Session timeout
• Scenario 2: Not all site pages are tagged
• Scenario 3: Redirects
• Scenario 4: Cross-Domain Traffic
• Scenario 5: Long entry page load times
• Scenario 6: Adobe Analytics cookie deleted mid-visit
Best,
Brian
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Hi Jay,
The below Laura Chase Adobe Marketing blog post is a great guide to troubleshoot Session Refresh (Internal Traffic):
To review since last-touch Session Refresh (Internal Traffic) with no overwrite can only occur if it was also the first-touch, the below scenarios explain how Session Refresh could be a first-touch channel. I would recommend looking into how/if the below is occurring to inform if the Processing Rule needs further refinement or to be broke out into additional sub-rules:
• Scenario 1: Session timeout
• Scenario 2: Not all site pages are tagged
• Scenario 3: Redirects
• Scenario 4: Cross-Domain Traffic
• Scenario 5: Long entry page load times
• Scenario 6: Adobe Analytics cookie deleted mid-visit
Best,
Brian
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Jay - We have had similar problems with our attribution and I believe it is because we have been attracting more first-time-ever visitors and the very first page you see on our site has higher page-load-times for all of the cookies and tags than for repeat visitors. Thus, I believe that these users are actually navigating to the 2nd page of the visit before our last-to-load s_code tag has time to capture the user's first page.
To Adobe Analytics, it seems that the 2nd page of the visit is actually the first page and the traffic source is tagged as "Internal Referrer". I am planning to alter my Marketing Channel Rules for these cases to look at the query string parameters of the Referring URL (which is an internal URL) so that I can properly attribute the channels in all of the cases where we were using query string parameters to set it in the first place. At the same time, I'm going to try to work with IT to decrease the load times if possible for the first-time visitors.
Hopefully that helps!
Heather G.
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Thanks, Heather.
Interesting, never thought about this. I know our desktop experience is fairly quick according to the tests we have run, but we do lag in mobile. Have you implemented the changes to the processing rules yet? Curious to see if this helped reduce the internal referrers for you.
Also, what I found recently is that that traffic sent to us from Facebook (within the mobile app) seems to be sent as internal vs. direct. However, if we add tracking variables to all links posted on FB, it solves the issue.
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Hi Brian,
Could you help explaining how scenario 6 would happen? It would be very helpful.
Thanks,
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Thanks, Brian.
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Hi Peter,
The Adobe Analytics cookie could be deleted via a Browser action:
http://www.aboutcookies.org/DEFAULT.ASPX?page=2
Best,
Brian
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Thank you Brian! In certain days we are seeing non-persistence cookie visitors are higher. Does that mean transactions/sales from these visitors are not being captured in Omniture? One example is May 19th: we saw a dip in sales in Omniture, but backend data warehouse that processing orders did not show the dip. Could this be caused by Omniture cookie deletion? Why would some days cookie deletion is significantly higher than other days?
Thanks,
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Hi Peter,
Non-persistent cookie visitors should not impact orders tracking as that is a page level event. Also all visitors regardless of cookie status will be counted as visits in v15 (see explanation below via Ben Gaines). I would recommend you investigate and review the traffic types and trends on the days when you have discrepancies across your two reporting systems.
Best,
Brian
http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/15-for-15-improved-metrics-and-logic/
>>
1. Visits for Non-Cookied Visitors
SiteCatalyst 14: Site visitors who do not accept persistent cookies via their browser are not included in the Visits total in any report, at either the site-wide or line-item level. This also applies to pathing data; for example, users who block cookies are not included in Bounce Rate calculations, the Fallout report, etc. Note that Discover has always included Visits and pathing data from non-cookied visitors. This occasionally led to a situation where your Unique Visitors could be higher than your Visits.
SiteCatalyst 15: All visitors, regardless of cookie acceptance, are included in Visits counts and pathing data.
What does this mean for me? First, it means a more complete and accurate view of many metrics. Of course, a visit is a visit, and, ideally, cookie acceptance should not determine whether a user’s time on your site counts as a visit. Second, it means an increase in the Visits metric in SiteCatalyst, although the degree of this increase varies depending largely on the type of implementation that you are using. A sample of data from our beta customers show a mean increase of less than 0.5% for first-party cookie implementations, and an increase of 5–12% for third-party cookie implementations (due to differences in cookie acceptance rates).
Keep in mind that this increase will also affect calculated metrics that use Visits or a pathing-related metric (such as Entries, Average Time Spent on Page, etc.) For example, many users have defined “Conversion Rate” as Orders divided by Visits. After upgrading to SiteCatalyst 15, you may see a minor increase in Visits with no corresponding increase in Orders, leading to what some could view as a small decrease in Conversion Rate (which, as any analyst will tell, can often raise red flags).
This also means that you should never see your Unique Visitors count exceed Visits.
How should I prepare for the change? You can determine the increase in Visits (and pathing metrics) that you are likely to see post-upgrade by logging in to SiteCatalyst 14, going to the Site Metrics > Visitors > Daily Unique Visitors report, and clicking on the “Persistent Cookies” filter. This will break out non-cookied visitors from cookied visitors in your existing data; you can divide [non-cookied visitors] by [total visitors] to determine the percentage increase that you are likely to see when you upgrade to SiteCatalyst 15. Then, we recommend working with your internal customers to help them understand and prepare for this improvement in this commonly used metric.
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Thanks, Brian!
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Hi Brian,
I have same issue. Suddenly my organic traffic has reduced and internal traffic has increased. I did go through the article. But my concern is, till previous month it was all good but suddenly starting October, it is reducing with no potential changes in Adobe Admin Rules or Tagging in last 12 months. Where can be the potential problem?
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