Visitor ID in Debugger is Different from Data Wharehouse

[brianjherbert]

Hi,

I am trying to find out my own traffic by comparing the Visitor ID that is being sent to me via the debugger with the Visitor ID being recorded in Omniture. It looks like there is some sort of conversion that is happening though. All the Omniture data is numeric (with an underscore) while the debugger is alpha-numeric (with a hyphen).  Any idea how to get these number to match, or is there another method to see the paths of unique visitors?

Any help would be appretiated!

[TanmayMathur · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Apologies for a delayed response.

The different numbers you are seeing is the conversion of the visitor id from base 16 to base 10. This is done to save long strings of data. This article should explain it - https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/kb/en_US/analytics/kb/visitor-id-populated.html

Let me know if you have further questions.

TM

[brianjherbert]

Bump

[brianjherbert]

Hi thanks for the response,

This does help a little, but I am still having trouble matching what I see in the debugger to the site analytics code even after I do the base 16 to base 10 conversion (although it does look closer).

The s_vi variable referenced in the help document you sent is not set in the cookie, only the s_fid variable (which matches the debugger visitor id) is set and looks like two hyphenated hexidecimal numbers. I did a convertion using the PHP function base_convert(), but the numbers still don't match.

Is this hex to decimal conversion to true for all the possible visitor id's stored?

B

[TanmayMathur]

Hi, 

Could you give us a example set of the numbers you are seeing in the image request and the corresponding number inside Reports & Analytics? We can have a look at it. 

Thanks!

TM

[brianjherbert]

Visitor ID from Adobe Debugger: 7DF9AD800CC34CF4-1CCFB79BD8147D0F

COOKIE s_fid = 7DF9AD800CC34CF4-1CCFB79BD8147D0F

PHP CODE:

baseconvert'7DF9AD800CC34CF4',16,10).'_'.str_baseconvert('1CCFB79BD8147D0F',16,10)   //convert base 16 to base 10

returns: 9077477289423492268_2076079833214123204

str_baseconvert'7DF9AD800CC34CF4',16,10).'_'.str_baseconvert('1CCFB79BD8147D0F',16,10)  //convert base 16 to base 10 (more precision)
returns: 9077477289423490292_2076079833214123279

Neither of these returned numbers is part of the dataset for visitor id in the data warehouse.

[warrensander]

use a prop, save the visitor id (s_vi) cookie value in it. then in your data warehouse request put the s_vi cookie now you have the same data in the same format to look at.

[brianjherbert]

I'd like to use the data that is provided me without having to do any of this kind of coding. I SHOULD be able to use the id's from the system to do the tracking, I am not sure why they just don't do the hex->dec conversion up front in the first place so it's the same across the board.

[brianjherbert]

TanmayM, Is there any other insight you can provide?

[bjoernkoth]

Hi tanmaym7102255​,

just stumbled over your response.

Unfortunately, the link you added way back does not work anymore.

We're having the same issue. having s_vi cookie data which does not match the Visitor ID in Analytics.

Is this actually a base 16 to base 10 conversion? So you could just use the parts separated by the dash and convert them into a number or string with either .toString() or Number.parseInt()?

Cheers,

Björn

[Pablo_Childe]

Hi i recommend using the Marketing ID.

What is the Marketing Cloud ID Service (MCID)?

I find its a more robust variable and all users automatically have it generated and saved for them. Allows for some very powerful segmentation building.

Also a little caveat I find trips up people is trying to do post analysis in lets say excel.. be careful when trying to open files with the data as the data gets truncated.

good luck to you

[bjoernkoth]

Hi,

thanks for the answer.

Meanwhile we're about to switch to the Experience Cloud Visitor ID (s_ecid cookie value) which - at least currently - does not seem to be transformed/shortened by Adobe.

Funny enough the response to my support ticket on Adobe returned more or less just a copy+pasted excerpt from a help page, saying the s_vi cookie contains a base16 value which is then transformed to a base10 value on AA side (thank you, captain obvious).

Still waiting for my response, asking how exactly that is reproducible since the obvious approaches do not seem to work - anymore.

Cheers,

Björn