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Why are visits to a page higher when I filter on that page?

Products

Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Webtrends Analytics 9.x

Cause

You have two separate profiles. One profile includes activity to the entire site and the other profile includes activity to a single page on the site.

When viewing the “Pages” report for the page, you may encounter a situation where the number of visits to the page is higher when you’re filtering only on that page.

Example –

  • Overall Profile –Page A: 40 Visits 50 Views
  • Profile filtering on just Page A –Page A: 45 Visits 50 Views

Resolution

By default a visit is closed after 30 minutes of inactivity. Using this information, we can determine why visits can be higher when filtering off of a single page.

Example scenario of how visits can differ using the above information:

A visitor comes to your site and hits Page A. This visitor looks around your site for the next 45 minutes and prior leaving your site, hits Page A again.

The visit itself will look something similar to the following in the log file:

10:00:00 Hit Page A
10:01:00 Hit pages on the rest of the site
10:15:00 Hit pages on the rest of the site
10:31:00 Hit pages on the rest of the site
10:38:00 Hit pages on the rest of the site
10:45:00 Hit Page A again and then left the site

For the overall profile, which doesn’t have a filter, Page A would have 1 Visit and 2 Views.

For a profile that has a filter to only include Page A in the reports, the report would show 2 Visits and 2 Views.

When the filter is applied, the profile no longer sees the activity that is not being included. When it runs against the above scenario, this profile only sees the following:

10:00:00 Hit Page A
10:45:00 Hit Page A again and then left the site

As the session tracking definition closes out a visit after 30 minutes of inactivity, because all the activity is being excluded between 10:00:00 and 10:45:00, each hit to the page is not also considered a separate visit.