Segmentation container to be used: Visitor or hit

Question

Hi team,I wanted to fully understand if we should use a visitor level container or a hit level for the case here- I want to capture the number of unique visitors over a period of time/months who have done a custom click events (e74 in the pic below). So, should i use visitor level segmentation container or a hit level- i am very sure it is visitor level but am being challenged here by a colleague so asking the experts here :). Also, any video/document which clarifies the difference between the segmentation containers with examples will be helpful. Thanks!

Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted Answer

Yes, my rule of thumb, target the segment as low as possible... If I am looking for a specific page, or a specific action, regardless of metric I plan on using, I will use HIT. This way, as @isha__gupta mentioned, I can pull in other metrics, such as page view or visits, and can make calculated metrics such as clicks per user, or clicks per visit.

I would write the segment as:

HIT [

Custom_Link Clicks (e74) exists

]

This segment here, if I use in a report, will give me back the hits of those clicks exactly. It won't include ALL the pages views, and all the visits, for every user that has every interacted with this click...

In yours, you also have to watch out for impacts such as changing your date range... let's look at an example:

Visit 1 - Jan 3

Page A
Page B

Visit 2 - Jan 10

Page C
Page D

Visit 3 - Jan 19

Page E
Page F
Event 74

If you pull a a report for Jan, and look at the month as a whole the UV will show 1. If you pull a report for Jan, and break it out by week, you will see "1" on each week of Jan (The total will still be 1), but unrealistically, the report will show the user in the weeks that they didn't trigger event74... this is because you are looking at the visitor as a whole for the panel range (i.e. the user interacted with the event in the panel range, and that user was on the site every week, therefore, this user will appear as a UV in each week).

A hit based segment will not have this behaviour, the UV will be limited to only to the weeks in which it was triggered.

		Unique Visitors
		Visitor Segment	HIT Segment
Week		1	1
	Jan 2	1	0
	Jan 9	1	0
	Jan 16	1	1

I am writing a series of articles on Segment Building, which the article specific to scope isn't yet done, my article that talks about exclusion, containers, and attribution touches on scope a bit:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/perspectives/the-magic-behind-the-curtain-complex-segments

Hopefully this will help add some clarity.

Isha__Gupta · Answer

Hey @shail1220,To tell you the truth, if you are only going to report on Unique Visitors metric, it wouldn't really matter if you use Hit or Visitor level segment and I don't think the numbers would really differ. However, if you are going to be looking at additional metrics such as Page Views or Visits, then it would drastically change whether you are using Visitor or Hit level segment.Hit is most granular level segment and will only account for visitors/visits/page views that accounts for that action.Visitor is most broad category and it will account for all the visits, page views that a visitor to whom you are attributing an action has done in past. Means, if a user has clicked on a custom link today and you use hit level, you will only count that one visit, that one page view for that visitor.But if you use visitor level, you will count all the visits and all the page views attributed to that visitor over visitor lifetime. But that wouldn't change the number of visitors altogether. You may want to review documentation for additional context - https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/analytics/components/segmentation/seg-containers Hope this helps! Best,Isha

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