Getting unspecified values in reports

[Jitty_Thomas1]

Hi community, while taking the dimension as content type and content unit and page views as metrics we were getting unspecified dimensions.But when I changed the metrics with their respective instances I was not able to find any unspecified.What can be the reason for this and can anyone suggest a best practice for this.

[abhinavbalooni]

Hey @Jitty_Thomas1 

Since you are looking at traffic metrics like pageviews, I am assuming you are looking at props for content type and content unit as dimensions.

Unspecified comes up in any report when the value is not set for any particular variable against that metric. In your case, it would mean that not every pageview has these props being set to a value. Link for more details: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/technotes/unspecified.html?lang=en

On the other hand, when you are looking at instances, instances are how many times was a variable set to a value/sent in an image request with a value. That means, it will never have unspecified, as it gets counted when the variables/dimensions have a value attached to them. Link for instances definition: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/metrics/instances.html?lang=en#

Hope the above helps.

Cheers,

Abhinav

[Jitty_Thomas1]

Hi Abinav,

@abhinavbalooni 

First of all thank you for your response.

We are using only evars for content unit and content type which expires after visit.

What is the ideal metrics to be used in our case.

[abhinavbalooni · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jitty_Thomas1 

Thanks for the response.

You can use instances in this case as a metric if you are just looking for how many times the eVar was set to a particular value as instances will not take into account persistence of eVars.

If you are looking at eVars, you can also then try pulling in a success event. For example, if event1 is custom pageview, then try putting that as a metric against the eVars.

On the other hand, if you do want to look at traffic metrics which are out of the box like page views, I would suggest using a prop instead of an eVar due to the persistence for eVars which may provide false information in this scenario.

Hope the above would help.

Cheers,

Abhinav

[Jitty_Thomas1]

Thanks abhinav, thank you for your help.