question with getNewRepeat() and manually overwriting?

[edbudev]

Question w/ the getNewRepeat() function. We have the following flow:

• User gets directed to Site A (www.sitea.com), selects an option
  • prop1 is set as "New Visitor"
• User gets directed to Site B (www.siteb.com) which is a different domain and is put into a queue (waiting room) and it goes over the 30mins
  • on siteb, we do not have adobe analytics on the page
• User is up next after waiting and is directed to Site A (www.sitea.com) to continue after waiting in line
  • back to sitea, when a user surpasses the 30min timer, it resets the session and prop1 is now set as "Return Visitor" instead of persisting the "New Visitor"

Would overwriting prop1 to maintain "new visitor" if we were to check if the referring domain was www.siteb.com affect any analytics? It would do the following:

1. Check if the referring url was www.siteb.com
2. Check if the cookie that was set by www.siteb.com was set

If both values are true, have prop1 as "New Visitor" so the new visitor persists. Would the Adobe "Common Analytics" plugin overwrite that prop? That prop is set within our Adobe Analytics extension as s.prop1 = getNewRepeat(), would a if statement checking if the referring URL was siteb and the cookie was set by siteb is true, then set s.prop1 = New Visitor.

Was thinking of also setting a success event to help w/ the metrics to help separate those who actually went to the flow of sitea > siteb > sitea

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Adobe Analytics Sessions timeout after 30 mins... even if someone opened Site A, left the site open for 30 mins (went to a meeting, went to get a coffee, got interrupted by a phone call, etc), then loaded a new page, that new page will be a new visit, and be treated like a Return Visitor.

If the session times out, and you force the value back to "new", you will now have "new" split across multiple visits.... 

In addition to the multiple visits issues, I don't think that overwriting the value IF the user comes from SiteB is a good idea... this sets yourself up for some very potentially problematic situations.... like when the user is a return visitor, then goes to Site B and returns... the user could go from Returning to New... Since you can't really pass info between Site A and Site B (i.e. the user's initial status), I don't think you can really get the granular control that you would need....

And with the added cross visit considerations... I think this is going to potentially cause a lot of headaches.

You could try contacting Client Care, they may be able to change your Visit Timeout, if being on Site B for more than 30 mins is a common occurrence; I am not sure if this will change the NewRepeat function.. I would hope its based on the Visit expiry, and not hard coded to the standard timeout.

I am not sure what "Check if the cookie that was set by www.siteb.com was set" is referring to... what cookie from Site B... assuming the domains are "sitea.com" and "siteb.com" cookies cannot be shared by these two different domains.... unless you are planning on adding a query parameter to the URL of Site A when returning from Site B that is used to set some cookie on Site A to use??

So while you can do some custom logic, I would caution against it... and if you are planning some custom logic, I would be tempted to leave the NewRepeat as it is... but add your own custom cookies, then build logic that reads the default cookie and your own to determine the behaviour... but again... I am not sure this would be a good idea given the visit has expired and the NewRepeat is doing exactly what it was designed to do... check and increment the value for a new visit....

[edbudev]

Thank you @Jennifer_Dungan 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You're welcome!

Good luck with your flow issues.

Out of curiosity, would it be possible to add Adobe to SiteB? Even if it's minimal, it would help to keep the session active.

[edbudev]

We can but with the short time frame we have to get this up and live, we wouldn't meet the go live date. Given that this is the behavior of the getNewRepeat() function especially what's currently in place on the site, we are ok to keep it as is and we can add a success event for this specific flow so it can help us pull metrics for the specific flow.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Gotcha. Yeah, start with the basics, then improve from there.

You might also want to consider adding SiteB as an internal URL (so that you don't trigger automatic exit links, or referral traffic in your Marketing Channels).

That isn't to say that you get rid of tracking when a user goes from Site A to B... but I would do a custom action for leaving your site... and since you mentioned looking at the referrer, you could add a custom action on returning...

[edbudev]

Yeah, we are looking into that option. We have something similar in place currently and we've done some testing to see how the data populates from our qa/dev team.

Thank you @Jennifer_Dungan !