Occurrences displaying same value as page views

[JacklinSt]

Hi - I'm seeing this on a couple of reports and not understanding why. Occurrences will give me something like "1385 out of 2772" instead of "2772 out of 2772." The partial value for Occurrences will match the value I get for Page Views (e.g. "1385 out of 1385"). Screenshot below. Any thoughts on what's happening? 

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Occurrences are Page Views and Actions combined... Page Views are just actual page views.

When you are using a dimension like "Page" which only exists on Page View metrics, this is why your totals match... the grand total is showing all occurrences within the time frame for your panel... but essentially you have a filter in place for where "Page exists" (hence why you are seeing "1385 out of 2772").

Now, this confuses a lot of people, but the Page dimension, even though you will see it sent on all tracking calls (page views and actions / clicks), the Page value is actually removed by the Adobe processing on actions / clicks... this is because Adobe doesn't have a dedicated "page view" event in the event list, instead, they count the hits that have pageName and/or pageURL as a page view... so both of those are removed from the hits so that your actions / clicks aren't counted as page views.

It's for this reason a lot of people will create custom dimensions to hold Page Name and Page URL on all hits (page views and actions / clicks), so that they have those available for correlation.

[bjoern__koth]

To add to what @Jennifer_Dungan said, Page Events are custom link instances, so that

Occurrences = Page Views + Page Events

[JacklinSt]

Thank you! This is very helpful, but I have a follow-up question. On some of our applications, the number of Occurrences displays as 100% (e.g. 2772 out of 2772) - screenshot below. What would make this scenario different from what you described in your reply? 

[bjoern__koth]

This looks like your specific pages don't contain any kind of custom link tracking next to the page view tracking

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Or rather those applications are only triggering page views and no actions. Therefore, page views (X) and actions (0), result in Occurrences (Page Views + Actions) = X + 0 = X.

Or your applications are also treating actions as page views (resulting in a complete match of the events).