Disparity between Unique Visitors count in AA and Real time population in AAM

[Kishore_Reddy]

Hello Experts,

I've created a segment in AAM with first party Online data - which is our Adobe Analytics data from our dotcom website.

I created a report in Adobe Analytics workspace with same criteria (by creating a segment in AA itself).

Now the question is, I see a 20% different between Unique Visitors show in AA and Real time segment population in AAM. Is this common?

[curtiso]

Hello kishore963, 

Hope you are well ! Let me start by explaining that Audience Manager & Analytics operate based on two separate data lakes, and so there may be discrepancies in the data between sync periods or for various other reasons. I also have a few questions about your implementation which may help us uncover the specific cause for this issue. If you're having trouble answering any of these questions, feel free to submit a ticket to Client Care so we can help you out directly.

Are you using an integration between Analytics & AAM? If so, my first question is related to the Analytics destination.  Do you know if all segments are being automatically mapped, or if they are being manually selected? Is the segment using a profile merge rule with authenticated user profiles for qualification? If so, do you know how many segments your authenticated profiles are associated with on average?

I'm asking these questions because when AAM passes segment membership to AA, it sets the number of segments associated with each user into a variable. That variable has a hard cap of 150 segments. So, if you have users with historic segment membership (most likely out of date if there are 150+ on their profile) some of those segments will be truncated & dropped when passing to AA. The resolution to this would be to manually map the most important segments to the Analytics destination, to guarantee they make their way into AA. You could also go the route of trying to clean-up the historic segment membership which, depending on the amount of clutter, may be quite a project. 

If you answered no to all of those questions then this disparity may be caused by some other aspect of the integration, or perhaps your specific implementation. In that case, I'd again suggest submitting a support ticket so we can work more closely with you to bring this to a resolution. 

[magnusflaaten2 · Accepted solution]

Look closely at the definition of what the "real time" numbers are telling you.

Real time 1 day: look at the documentation. It doesnt state you have to qualify that particular day. What it really says is that a device that was qualified was seen that day. Meaning; you have qualified for the segment at some point in time (whitin the traits TTL and the segments recency) - regardless of if you qualified for the segment yesterday OR at a previous visit. So if you qualified for the segment 10 days ago, and you visted the premises again yesterday (any random page sending data to AAM) with the same device, you will surface in the 1 day count number for the segment. - a qualified device was seen by adobe. 

If you use a device graph (device stiching) the pieces will fall into place since the numbers then will be inflated by also adding all cross-device units associated with the profile (its then the profile that has been qualified) that visited your premises yesterday. 

To replicate numbers seen in AA you have to look at this on a Trait level. But; segments made out of several traits could then be subject to "correction for double counting" e.g. you could count as one in each trait since you have exhibited all traits, but only show as one on a segment level. Its complex. 

You will find a perfect match between an individual trait real time numbers and numbers in analytics with a 24 hr delay (so not so real time after all). 

[Kishore_Reddy]

Thank you for your response.