Traffic tracking Issue

[hirenp]

The volume of visits as per the marketing channel is approx 510K, while when I try to check the same volume using Entry Url of page the volume drops down to 291K. I also noticed that my page variables "Entry Page" & "Page" have the exact same visits  490K.

Can someone help me to diagnose this issue and understand the problem:
1) if Marketing channel is recording more visits

2) if my entry url is not tracking properly

3) Any other scenario which you may think of.

[prads]

Hi,

Marketing channel visits should be same as Entry page URL (Custom variable). Entry page URL contains unspecified visits. Please check if you are excluding unspecified visits as a segment in your report  if not then check your entry url custom tracking.

Visits are calculated on session level hence you are getting 490K for "Page" and "Entry Page".

Thanks.

[MandyGeorge · Accepted solution]

Hi @hirenp, I actually had to explain this exact thing to my SLT on Friday. 

An 'entry' is the first value associated with that particular dimension in a visit. So when it comes to marketing channels, the first one that brings a customer to your site is the entry marketing channel. However, they can leave the site and come back, and if it's less than 30 minutes, it's still considered the same visit, so it's not a new entry.

For example:

google search > click on paid result > land on your site > hit back button and return to google results > click a natural search result > land on your site again.

For the purpose of this example we're going to assume this happened in less than 30 minutes, so it's all one visit. In this case, your entry marketing channel would be paid search. So, it gets 1 entry and 1 visit. But then later in the visit they got to the site by SEO. It gets 1 visit, but because it isn't the first value for that dimension in the visit, it doesn't get an 'entry' attributed to it. A reporting table for this would look like

	Entries	Visits
Marketing Channel	1	1
SEO	0	1
Paid Search	1	1

So no, your marketing channels aren't broken, this is an expected result. The entry gets attributed to the first marketing channel in the visit, but visit counts anything that was seen at any point in the visit. Your 'grand total' row should deduplicate the visits, so that number should match your entries (the "marketing channel" line), but each individual channel can have a difference between entries and visits.

When you're using entry URL, you're looking at what is attributed to that first page of the site.