Instances vs. Visits in Omniture
An interesting question was posted to the Web Analytics forum: why is Omniture reporting higher referral instances than visits to a site?
What is a visit?
Omniture says "a visit is a term that refers to a visitor’s access to a website. The visit begins when a person first views a page on your company's website. It will continue until that person stops all activity on the site for 30 minutes." You might want to view my previous post on the atoms of web analytics.
What is an instance?
Again, Omniture says "an instance as relates to the number of times that a unique event occurs in SiteCatalyst". First, I wouldn't say in "SiteCatalyst"... the event occurs on my site, but that's a detail. An instance = count of event.
The counts doesn't match up!
In the screen snapshot above, the number of visits is 62,013 while the number of instances for 87,444... How can SiteCatalyst register 41% more instances than visits? But wait! We're not measuring apples with apples. Instances and visits are two different measurement units.Let's do an example
Nothing better than an example to demonstrate the difference.| Time | User activity | Visits | Instances |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00pm | A visitor goes on Google and do a search for "web analytics". | ||
| 8:01pm | That visitor click on a link to "immeria.net" | +1 | +1 from Google |
| 8:05pm | The visitor browse a few pages and leave my site. | ||
| 8:06pm | The visitor goes back to Google and do a search for "Omniture 3rd party cookie" and find the second entry to be an article from my site | +0 | +1 from Google |
| 8:15pm | The visitor does a "back" and look for other results from Google, than find the fine piece about "Web Analytics technical implementation best practices". | ||
| 8:30pm | After reading the article, the visitor look at the comments. One of them links to my site | +0 | +1 from kaushik.net |
| 9:30pm | The visitor leave for more than 30 minutes since the last hit to my site, then come back and click on my home page link. | +1 | |
| End result: | 2 | 3 |
Hope that helps!
11 comments:
And how useful is it to know Instances?
I understand the need for measuring an event that occur multiple times during a single visit, but at the same time, there are usually other ways to asses similar information (like how many time search was used during a visit). The good thing is Omniture can be configured to count referrer visits instead of instances.
In your example will SiteCatalyst credit an order to the appropriate instance or does it always apply the referring visit?
Committing an order (by specifying a purchaseID and triggering the Order event) will assign this event to all current variables, including the visit, custom variables, other events instances, etc. This way, you should be able to segment the Order metric by almost any other metric.
Hi I am kristy,
It is nice to see the post. Could you help me on counting referrer visits in Omniture? I was looking for that but can't find it.
I use Omniture version 13.5. I checked Referring Domains Report in both CONVERSION(CAMPAIGN) and TRAFFIC, and also Referrers Report in TRAFFIC. Special setting needed?
Kristy, see my post about Instances of Referrers Report in Omniture
Hello, a good question that one of my colleagues brought up: how come an instance is not counted at 9:30? My thinking is that it's because the visitor never left the immeria.net domain. However, this begs another question: if this is true, then does it mean that an instance will never be counted again as long as the visitor never leaves the site? Or does instance also reset after a 30-minute session timeout, similar to visits?
Tom: The reason for that is this:
- At 8:30 you are not on my home page, you are on a content page, idling for 30minutes ends the session
- At 9:30, when you click from the article to go back to my home page, you are already on immeria.net, you don't come from "outside", thus, starting a new session but not adding +1 to any instances of referrers.
The instance is not counted on exit of the site, it's counted as it happen on a page view.
"So, in theory, one can fabricate a scenario where visits is HIGHER than instances by never leaving a site and clicking on the "home" link after every minutes, right?"
You should consider "instances" as being the number of times an event happened. In my example, SiteCatalyst says "how many times did someone come from Google? Or from Kaushik.net?", thus, 2 instances from Google and one from kaushik.net.
Another use of instances could be "how many times did someone add a product to the shopping cart?". You could have 5 visits, 10 product views, 3 views of the shopping cart, yet, the number of instances of the event "add to cart" could be 2 because the visitor added 2 products to the cart.
Hi Stephane,
If a visitor closes the browser (explorer) at 9h10 and open a new one (always explorer) at 9h15, will it be a new visit?
I am pretty sure that if he closes explorer at 9h10 and open Mozilla at 9h15 it will be two differents visits... Am I right?
Sophie: closing the browser will clear all session cookies. Thus, closing at 9:10 and opening back at 9:11 on the same site will generate two distinct visits. Switching browser also not only generates two visits, but also two distinct visitors, since each browser manage its own set of cookies.
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