Web Analytics India

- Contributed by Saagar Shinde

Why does a unique visitor differ from report “A” and report “B” even though it is tracked for Europe territories in both the cases? We use Omniture tool to extract analytics data.

The problem was Report “A” consists of different territories across Europe, when unique visitors amount is aggregated it differ from Report “B” which reports on complete Europe traffic.

For a new web analyst he might start scratching his head! He could say what the hell went wrong. Did he make a mistake in pasting the value in the report or did he miss out any territory in Report “A”.

The first thing to understand is differences the way the data is extracted from Omniture:

(Note: “T” represents Territory of Europe & V represents value)

This could be an ideal picture to elaborate the points & will help us to understand better. “Europe” represents Global Reporting Suite whereas “Spain, France & Brazil” represents Individual Reporting Suite.

Here we can see 2 types of Omniture tags used to collect data. Europe Suite Tag is common in all websites. It’s called as Global Reporting suite for Europe as we have defined earlier. The function of this Global Reporting suite for Europe is to collect aggregate data from website 1, 2 & 3. Additional feature of this Omniture tag data is “Deduplication”. Let say Mr. X visits Website 1, 2 & 3.

Through typical implementation Mr. X could be counted as unique visitors by 3 websites. Now the wrong understanding comes in. If data for all three websites are aggregated Mr. X could be counted 3 times in global suite. This is not true. Remember Omniture using “Deduplication” by which Mr. X is counted only once.

Report B – Values are taken from Global Reporting Suite of Europe which uses “Deduplication” so Mr. X is counted just once as unique visitors.

So Report A – Values are taken from individual Country Reporting Suite, which uses the traditional way to track Unique Visitors. If Mr. X goes to Website 1, 2, & 3: he will be tracked as Unique Visitors on all three website. When you sum up the data of all three websites Mr. X will be counted as thrice as Unique Visitors, ending up with mistaken & misleading data.

Mistakes:

• You can’t compare these two reports because they are tracked differently.
• You can’t sum up the Unique Visitors in Report A because they are Unique Visitors across different territories of Europe it doesn’t mean they are Unique Visitors across Europe.

Please share your views and experiences about the problems faced regarding individual & global reporting suites or the solution you came up with.