Missing Adobe Analytics Data

[MerveMutlu]

Hello.

I moved an existing site to a new site format and started using Adobe Analytics.

I was previously using Google Analytics as a data tracking tool, but I have been using Adobe Analytics for the last month. When I looked at the data of the last month, I realized that there was a very dramatic decrease. When I did research on this, I saw that there could be a 3-8% data loss, but my data dropped quite a lot. What could be the reason for this?

[aa_from_savoy]

Hi @MerveMutlu the reasons can be multiple:

• GA and Adobe Analytics are not implemented in the same way (maybe they have different triggers, events...)?
• the new website is very different from the previous one and this impact the performance
• the old GA implementation was bugged and count the same event twice or more...

Do you still have GA implemented in the new website to compare data?

Where do you see the main differences: Visits, Page Views, Occurrences?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I agree with all of this @aa_from_savoy 

There will always be differences between the values when comparing GA to AA (they are different tools, have different potential opt-outs, are blocked by different browsers/extensions, etc)

We have both free GA and AA on our sites, we look more for comparable trends then completely matching data. A 3-8% difference isn't actually that bad... in fact for the different tools, I would consider that well within normal tolerance.

But if you recently changed your site, you could be impacted by unhappy users / SEO impacts from the migration.... we went through a migration last year, and we are still doing SEO tweaks and improvements on the new site... 

[jeff_bloomer]

Yes, we have also learned to never compare the two, because Adobe Analytics performs differently than GA, to the point that GA's data is oftentimes inflated, more often than not when compared to Adobe's.  To Jen's point, those are ALL valid.

You could use GA as a guide - MAYBE, but Adobe will definitely be a lot more accurate as you move forward.  Also, it may also depend on your user's out-of-the-box cookie choices (believe it or not).  If they are not allowing you to track them, this will cause you to lose data, too.  We learned that the hard way.

Plenty of unknowns in this box of chocolates!

[MerveMutlu]

Thank's for the information. I realize there will be loss of data. There was just a very dramatic decrease and I couldn't find any information about it.

[MerveMutlu]

Hello Jennifer,

Did you experience the same situation as me after the site migration last year? How did you prevent this loss?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Our traffic loss was 100% due to SEO performance (and also we're a news organization in Canada, this was right at the time Facebook implemented their News Ban so we also lost traffic due to that).

What I did not do, as it seems you did was to cold turkey switch out analytics one for another.... we have Adobe, GA (free version) and Parse.ly Analytics on our sites, we have had them for years... we had them before and after our migrations... 

GA has never lined up with Adobe... though in our case, GA is lower than Adobe, but part of that is due to we have a few areas that required some extra TLC in tracking that we just never rolling into our GA (our community events pages are like an SPA inside of the main website, I only trigger the page changes in Adobe right now, so that accounts for a lot of our differences - eventually I will try to fix that for GA, but it's not been a high priority).

The point is, GA and Adobe are very different tools, we very different behaviours... you can't really do a one to one comparison, watching trends is mostly what we do... Is everything going up? Is everything going down? Is everything holding steady?   And when there are discrepancies in that, we use that as a starting point to investigate what might be happening... 

[MerveMutlu]

There seems to be a big drop in site traffic right now.

[MerveMutlu]

There is a decrease in all data regarding website traffic. With the launch of the new web page, questions began to arise about whether third-party cookies were working or not while the site was being opened. Could this be the reason for data loss? Do you have a predicted cookie policy approval rate?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Cookie Policy adoption rate would vary based on your audience, it's not something I would attempt to guess...

However, what is your cookie policy? Is this something new on your site? Also, accepting cookies is different than allowing analytics... Do you have conditions on your tracking looking for "acceptance"? That would result in a big loss if you stop tracking completely....

A lot of people seem to be implementing their analytics such that if people don't accept cookies, then they don't fire analytics... but the cookie policies are more about fingerprinting cookies, and that isn't technically required for analytics... you can continue to track, but it will result in higher numbers on UVs.... basically, ECID has a cookie policy written into it (so when cookies aren't accepted, no ECID will be written to the site)...

If you want to take this further, and are really interested in not fingerprinting people, then in your analytics extension, you can set your cookie policy to session (to try and prevent your s_vid cookie from persisting - this is the older fingerprinting cookie that can get set per domain)... 

[MerveMutlu]

Hello Jennifer,
What exactly is the "cookie" you mentioned in the last paragraph? Is this a tool?

Or do we need to add some code?

"If you want to take this further, and are really interested in not fingerprinting people, then in your analytics extension, you can set your cookie policy to session (to try and prevent your s_vid cookie from persisting - this is the older fingerprinting cookie that can get set per domain)..."

Please, inform me

Thank you.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Adobe has multiple fallbacks for identifier users....

The current standard is the Visitor ID Service, which uses the ECID cookies. This ECID is suppose to be set to the same value on all sites within your Org (so that it's easier to identify the same user across multiple sites)

However, in the event that the ECID fails to set (or it's disabled), Adobe will fallback on the old Visitor ID cookie s_vid, which is set per domain (so it's not cross site compatible) but it will ID the same user who returns to the site multiple times. This cookie is technically set for a year, but with a lot of the browser policies, many cookies will be deleted after 7 days.

However, depending on your cookie policy in what you are asking people to opt out of applies to the site level s_vid cookie, then you might want to make sure that this doesn't follow people.... 

There is no real "opt out" of the s_vid cookie, but there is a setting on your analytics extension which should allow you to override the default cookie behaviours and set them to session, which should prevent the fallback cookies from following a user between sessions. (Note, I have not done this, as we haven't added a cookie opt out yet, so make sure you test this).