Participation metrics and referrer discrepancy in Site Section (Channel) Report

[EggBoy]

Hi All,

We are having trouble with some metrics set up as participation metrics....as we understand it, the Adobe participation metrics work per visit...yes?

In the report below, you can see the issue....the little (p) we append in reports indicates participation...in this case, the ShopOrders(p) and Docs(p) will occur in a different site section, so we need to use participation to see if a site section has any impact on key metrics.

In this case, we describe the ShopOrders and Docs (document downloads) as "Shop Orders and Document Downloads that occurred during a visit that included our Marketplace site section (which uses the channel prop).

I can explain the visits/visitor discrepancy pretty easily: the same visitor accessed the site over time from different referrers. That makes sense. The Orders and Docs doesn't...if I understand participation, it is per visit...and since there can be only one referrer per visit, then the numbers should not overlapped.

Are we running an invalid report? Help! Director level people with hit us with wet noodles if we show them this without a cogent explanation!

[Abhijeet_Mishra · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Referrer is calculated at the Hit level i.e. a single Visit can contain more than 1 Referrer hence more than 1 Referrer Type. A quick example below:

Let's say I land on your site via a Search Engine. This would mean my Referrer Type currently would be Search Engine. Now, I navigate on your site for 10 min. and then bookmark the page and close the tab. After 5 min. I open that bookmark again and access your site. As I cam back within 30 min, the same Visit would continue; And since this time I used a bookmark, there was no Referrer, it'd in-turn update my Visit's Referrer Type to Typed/Bookmarked from Search Engine.

As a result, now my 1 unique visit has 2 Referrer Types. Hence, if you'd look at participation version of any success metric such as Orders, it'd be even credited to both Referrer Types.

Hope this helps.

[EggBoy]

Hi Abhijeet, that makes sense...we were under the impression that there was only one referrer per visit. When I run 'Original Referring Domain" the numbers add up, and tells me that visitors seem to be using Google to search my site during there visit...which sometimes I do...open Google results in multiple tabs etc.

This makes sense to me....thank you so much!

-Eugene

[PratheepArunRaj]

AbhijeetKMishra​ ,

This is your answer:

Let's say I land on your site via a Search Engine. This would mean my Referrer Type currently would be Search Engine. Now, I navigate on your site for 10 min. and then bookmark the page and close the tab. After 5 min. I open that bookmark again and access your site. As I cam back within 30 min, the same Visit would continue; And since this time I used a bookmark, there was no Referrer, it'd in-turn update my Visit's Referrer Type to Typed/Bookmarked from Search Engine.

Question:

Each session would have a session ID right? Even if I close the session in 15 minutes and come back in 5 minutes, another session ID should be generated right? Home come it is bucketed under same session but with different referrers?

Based on your explanation, even if i close my browser 5 times and re-open the website again & again within 30 minutes, everything is counted as 1 visits. But this is not ideal right? If i close my browser it should end my session with session ID and create a new session ID when i come back and that is ideal.

Bit confused.

Kindly explain.

Thank You!

Arun

[Abhijeet_Mishra]

Hi Arun,

Our Visit calculation isn't dependent on browser session.

Any visit expires either after 30 min of inactivity (site activity) or 12 hours of continuous activity.

[lilyz10577351]

Hi AbhijeeKMishra,

A follow-up question on the above metrics for referrer type, could you please help explain why the actual sum of visitors (820) and visits (911) are less than the total sums coming from Adobe, i.e, visitors (843), visits (978)?

Thank you for your help!

Lily

[PratheepArunRaj]

Dear Lily,

Referrer Type will not include Internal Filters and thus those numbers will not be included.

Example : If abc.com is set under set Internal Filters, then the traffic from the refferrer will not be mapped there.

Marketing Channel will give the answer.

Thank You!

Arun