Single sessions having multiple page visits

[Andrew1]

Newer to using adobe but use a few other tools to track metrics. I have continued to find that Adobe is higher than some other tools. When digging in, I see some specific sessions counting multiple times for a visit. Testing my own session I found it counted 2 times into the views metric but I do not see how it should have based on the documents. It seems that it is when a user opens items in a new tab. Would Adobe view a new tab as a new visit?

[MandyGeorge]

I'm not quite sure I'm following what you're asking. What is counting multiple times?

If you're looking at page views, it's definitely possible to view the same page more than once. 

Maybe you can give an example of how you're building out your table? What dimension are you using and against which metric? Do you have any segments applied?

[Andrew1]

In this case I am in a free form table and just adding a visits metric by day. In some cases I see the same session showing as multiple visits; even if its only a session for 3-4 minutes (using another tool for this). Would it be possible for a short user session to count as multiple visits even during a short duration?

[MandyGeorge]

If you're looking at this by day, it's possible that a visit could start on one day and continue to the next. For example, if I come to the website at 11:55pm, and stay on the site until 12:15am, it's one visit, but it spans two days. So in a table where you're looking at it by day, that visit will be counted in both rows/days. The grand total at the top should give you a deduplicated amount.

[Andrew1]

That makes sense, but in many cases I am seeing something like the following. Session starts at 12:03 PM that lasted for about 6 minutes as a session (looking in our session replay tool). If I look at that in adobe for Visits within the 12:00 PM- 12:15 PM time range, it shows 3 visits. Looking though it is a native mobile session with embedded web views. So its going native, web view, native, native, web view for example. Would each new web view count as a visit? I know comparing tools is not the way to go but from what I am seeing it seems like this would lead to elevated visit numbers.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

It's possible that each webview might be generating new user cookies on each use, that is inflating your UVs and Vs metrics... this is not typical behaviour...

To try and reduce this inflation, have you implemented ID sharing where the ECID of the app is passed to the web links, so that the web implementation will identify the page view as the same user in the same session?

https://developer.adobe.com/client-sdks/home/base/mobile-core/identity/tutorials/id-sharing/

[Andrew1]

I am seeing this in web too. I do see looking at the HAR file I saved that a few different config ID's are getting called. Would this potentially cause an issue with views getting counted multiple times? I know I am also dimensioning on a value that could be causing issues and occurring multiple times.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Are your UVs also inflated?

Can you check that your site is properly setting the s_ecid cookie? This could cause different page views to call the visitor id service again and set a new visitor ID for the same user, causing both a new Visitor and Visit to be counted?

Would you be willing to share a URL to you site so that I can see what is happening (you can send this via a private message so that it's not available to the public)?

[Andrew1]

Just looked at Unique visits and see it looks higher. I do wonder if it's how often this custom dimension is getting called. Could that inflate data since it's a custom metric? I would think Unique Visits should be that though; unique. If I segment by minute even on our dimension I get 4 unique visits during one minute.