I have noticed that there are discrepancies when using segments to collect information as opposed to filters that I feel should equal each other yet do not. For the following example the Reporting Suite, Segment, Date Range, Metrics are all the same unless specifically stated that they are different.
Say in Ad Hoc, I make a report using the segment set to Hit Container vs Visit or Visitor container. Many metric results will differ (Page Views will differ in all three cases, visits will differ however Unique Visitors will not differ.) Ok I get that based on what I know about containers.
Now I do that same thing just break it down by page dimension. Now all metrics are the same no matter what container I use. It appears that once broken down by page only the Hit container can be used.
Now a similar case, I but this time I break it down by Country looking at United States Dimension. Page Views, Visits, and Unique Visitors are different. Ok despite Unique Visitors being different I expected Page View and Visits to change.
Now I modify the segment and create a nested container within each page definition with AND logic requiring the country to be United States for each page (pages have OR logic with each other). This time all of the metrics are different, no surprise, what is more encouraging is that the metrics for the Hit Container for this report match the numbers of the previous Hit Container when breaking down by country by using a dimention. However this is where the similarity ends, the other containers of this report Visits and Visitors do not match the Visits or Visitors of the country breakdown, they are totally different numbers.
Question: How do I know which result is the true result? I expect the response will be, "Both are correct, they are different views of the same data." So then how are they different? Why does breaking down by page force visits and visitor containers to be the hit container? I should get the same results using a dimension to breakdown by country and looking at one country (or filtering by that country) or adding logic in a segment that isolates that country shouldn't I? There does not appear to be any consistency on this behavior...It seems that the behaveior is differnt for every dimension/segment logic.
