Why Hit Depth 1 occurrences is less than total number of Visits

[angela003]

I assume that when a visit starts, it would always correspond to have Hit Depth 1.  Therefore, occurrences for Hit Depth 1 should be equal to grand total visits.  However, this is not the case.  Occurrences for Hit Depth 1 is less than total visits.  Why?

[AtulSingh]

Hi @angela003 ,
I guess its because of you are looking at 2 different reports.
Consider the following example:

Visit 1	Visit 2	Visit 3
Hit 1	Hit 1	Hit 1
	Hit 2	Hit 2
		Hit 3

If you have 3 visits with 1 hit, 2 hits & 3 hits respectively. For each visit, hit depth 1 has 3 occurrences but if you check for visits with hit depth = 1, it will give you 1 visit, as for the other 2 visits, hit depth is 2 & 3 respectively, hence for for hit depth = 1 you would only see 1 visit in return.

Occurrences tells you about how many times a value has occurred, so if you look for occurrences of hit depth = 1, it occurred 3 times (for each visit) but for visits, it will give you 1.

[angela003]

In your example above, I would expect to see total number of visit to be 3 and Hit 1 occurrence to be 3 as well. However, that was not the case. While this doesn't happen for all visit, when I drilled down to person/visit, I can see some hit 1 missing (but not all) when a person have more than 1 visit during the day.

[angela003]

The first reply doesn't reflect what I'm seeing on my report.  See my comment below.  Anyone else has other ideas?  Thank you!

[vibhatna]

@angela003 ,

Occurrences for Hit Depth 1 less than total visits is possible in case of Mid-night / Roll over visits. 

For example, a user started a visit at 11:45 PM on Jun. 1st hence got the Hit Depth 1 set to Jun. 1st but visit is not over yet.

Second hit made by the same user - Jun. 2nd at 12:05 AM (within 30 minutes of inactivity) in continuation of visit started on Jun 1st. In this case Hit Depth 2, Hit Depth 3 and so on will be seen in the reporting for Jun. 2nd and NO Hit Depth1 for this user on Jun. 2nd as it was made on Jun. 1st

Suppose there was one more visitor who started the visit on Jun 2nd at 3 PM(Hit Depth 1)

So in reporting for Jun. 2nd, Hit Depth 1 has Occurrence = 1 but Total visit = 2. Please refer the highlighted data in the screen shot below:

Hope this helps.

[angela003]

Thanks a lot for the above. I haven't thought of the possibility of cut-off time, but I can certainly understand your point. Is there other possible conditions? 2% of my pageview traffic occurs before the midnight hour. However, only 79% of my visits have Hit Depth 1.

[angela003]

Is there other possible conditions other than the cutoff time between 2 days? 2% of my pageview traffic occurs before the midnight hour. However, only 79% of my visits have Hit Depth 1.

[jantzen_b]

Do any of the answers below answer your initial question? If so, can you select one of them as the correct answer? If none of the answers already provided answer your question, can you provide additional information to better help the community solve your question?

[angela003]

none of the answers below answered my initial question. I'm wondering whether someone from Adobe can

[AtulSingh]

@angela003 Could you please shared the screenshot of the report, probably that'd help understanding the issue better ?

[angela003]

@AtulSingh Here is the report for the same time period.  You can see that there were 278k visits with 221k Hit Depth1 occurrences, and it is not due to the cut-off time issue.  Shouldn't 278k visits results in 278k Hit Depth 1 occurrences?    

[atulsingh17]

Looking at the report, the only reason possible here is the case of midnight visit.
You can validate that creating a segment with the definition of "Exclude all the visits with hit depth = 1" and remaining you'd have visits where hit depth 1 is not present.

If you breakdown any of the visit from the segmented data, you should see all the visits with their hit depth would be a day prior.

[angela003]

@atulsingh17 the variance between hit level 1 occurance and # of visit is about 18% while the largest possible midnight visit is at 2%.

[jantzen_b]

Do any of the answers provided answer your initial question? If so, can you select one of them as the correct answer? If none of the answers already provided answer your question, can you provide additional information to better help the community solve your question?