Why would Hit Depth be less than Visit Depth ?

[mubarakd5726232]

IF Hit depth is incremented on every during a Visit and Visit depth only incremented for a Page View hit AND Pagename is not the same as previous, shouldn't the Hit Depth always be either equal or greater than Visit Depth ?

Take the following example with Segment applied ..

Surely if Visit depth was 2 it should have taken at least 2 hits to register so why would Hit depth be at 1 for a (large) percentage of Visit depth = 2 ?

[mesood]

Visit Depth will be increase in case of page view but not in custom link call. Please refer to example for getting more clarity on how visit depth is calculated

https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/reference/hit-depth.html

[mubarakd5726232]

Thank you for your reply, however ...surely if Visit depth does not increase for custom links .. then for a Visit Depth of 2 ie (should have at least taken 2 Page View hits and Pagename different) the Hit depth should be greater than 1 and NOT 1 as in data provided.

[AtulSingh · Accepted solution]

Hi @mubarakd5726232 ,
I'll try to explain with an example:

If a user has following steps:

Page A > Link 1 > Link 2 > Link 3 > Page B
In this case,
Hit Depth would be 1,2,3,4,5 respectively.
Visit depth would be 2 pages per visit.

Notice: Hit depth calculates the depth of individual step, whereas visit depth shows the aggregate in a particulat visit.
Which is why if you'd breakdown MCID by hit depth, you would see:
    VisitorID
          >Hit Depth 1
          >Hit Depth 2
          >Hit Depth 3
          >Hit Depth 4
          >Hit Depth 5
But if you break MCID by Visit depth, you would see:
    VisitorID
          >Pages per visit:2
and NOT something like:
    VisitorID
          >Pages per visit:1
          >Pages per visit:2

Since Visit Depth show you aggregate of pages visited during a visit, hence if you break any visit with more than 1 page views, no matter if you break hit depth 1, 2, 3...so on, you will always see aggreagated visit depth.

In above example: If you breakdown Hit depth 1 (or any hit depth) by visit depth, you would see 2 pages per visit.

Hope that helps!

[mubarakd5726232]

Thank you that explains it. Visit depth is (re) calculated and aggregated as visit level and thus not possible to break down. ie if Visit depth was 4 it would not be possible to check values for dimension/metric for the second Page View in the visit as you could if you were looking at Hit Level. Verified by creating segment containers at Hit and Visit level.

Suspect IF Then segment may provide me what I need, but would be helpful to have a third dimension .. HIT Depth, VISIT (hit) Depth and VISIT (visit) Depth

[AtulSingh]

Yep, that's correct.