More than 100% Visits

[paul_johnson1]

Hi. I'm working on an ecommerce site and I wrote some logic to populate the s.state (and others variables) for each successfully placed order and the report is populated. I'm looking at the Visitor State report, using the Visits metric.

The problem is that Total of the report is matching the None count, even though the report is showing the states I've been sending...the percentage is 120%..

Also, the Total of the Visits table is matching the Total of the Visitor State, meaning that my data was not counted as a visit, only added in the Visitor state report ?..is that even possible? 

Something like this:

Visitor State Report

1.None               Visits : 300 - 100%

2. SomeState1    Visits :10 - 5%

3. SomeState2    Visits: 45 - 10%

4.SomeState3:    Visits:  3 - 1%

                             Total: 300

[brian_au · Accepted solution]

The reason why your visits counts are adding up over 100% is because there is not de-duplication of visits across the line items. So a visitor can increment a 'visit' in BOTH the 'None' line item AND a given specific state value if set over the course of the visit. The way to conceptually think of this is that the Visitor state status increments metrics depending on the varying phases of state values (either not set at all OR set to a state value on order confirmation).

The intent behind the state variable is outlined below, but it typically is used with end conversion point metrics (orders, revenue, units)

Reference Info: https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/sc/implement/state.html

Because the state and zip variables expire immediately, the only events associated with them are events that are fired on the same page on which they are populated. For example, if you are using state to compare conversion rates by state, you should populate the state variable on every page of the checkout process. For conversion sites, Adobe recommends using the billing address as the source for the Zip Code, but you may choose to use the shipping address instead (assuming there is only one shipping address for the order). A media site may choose to use zip and state for registration or ad click-through tracking.

Best,

Brian

[jon_kranz]

We are also seeing an excessive amount of "None" in Visitor State. It's confusing our marketing department and contributes to an overall lack of trust in the numbers we are capturing using Adobe Analytics. 

Is there a way to correct this problem so that it only fires once?