Segments with a visitor container and breakdown by day dimension

[kjz36074788]

I created a segment of users who had credit application clicks using a visitor container.  I used the month of April as the panel date range.  And there're about 4 million users (unique visitor). When I added a day dimension there're about 160K unique visitor each day.  What does the 160K mean?   Active unique visitor in each day who had made credit application in the month of April?    Because if I switch the segment container to visit level, the total is still 4 million users (unique visitor), but the daily visitor is much lower about 80K.

If I want to build a dashboard for the IT team to improve the engagement of credit applications, which segment container is better?  I feel like the visit level contain provides better information on the day level.  Is that right?

[leocwlau]

When you use 'visitor' as the container, the table will match any visitor who had credit application clicks regardless of when that happened. It means there are 160K visitors on a particular date visiting your site and they had credit application clicks at any point in time.

When using 'visit' as the container, it limits the credit application clicks to the corresponding visit. So the 80K means there are 80K visitors visiting your site and had credit application clicks on that day as well.

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Just to add to this fine answer, when you create a segment at visitor level.. this is lifetime of the visitor (did this user ever do this action.... when you pull that into your report, it will limit the data to the "users that ever performed that action" that came to the site during your time frame.

Visit is definitely more focused, cause they need to have performed the action within the time frame... 

In many cases, I still prefer to use "hit" level in a lot of my segments... if I pair this with the UV metric, I still get the data I need (UVs who did X) but then if I want to get the count of actions (I don't get all the PVs in the entire visit that need to be filtered out)

[kjz36074788]

Thank you for replying.

If a segment is defined at visitor level, it still bounded by the calendar correct?   If the calendar is selected as April, it only chose visitors who had credit applications in April but not the whole history. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

No.... the problem is the order of operation...

The Segment is done first "unique visitors that did X"

The the calendar selection shows the users that were in your site in that month / range (but the segment action would be from all time).

So let's say you created a segment:

Unique Visitors that click on Button X

This would be based on all time "users who ever clicked on X", then your report looking at April, would show the users from that group that came to your site in April.

If you need to look at "Unique Visitors that click on Button X Last Month" you would need to add a "last month" range into the segment, but you also need to note to users that the segment is locked to a specific time frame (can be rolling like "last month", but would be locked into a specific rolling range). Changing your report to This Year, the segment would still be "Last Month"