Re: [Summary-Talk] 3.0b5 feedback - visits vs pages

[Jason Linhart <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dale LaFountain wrote:
> 
> However, I do have a couple questions. Specifically, I'm looking at
> "Referring Domains" report (/report/20) and within that the columns
> for Visits and Pages.
> 
> Having restricted my log processing to a single day, I am seeing the
> following results for a certain referrer:
> 
> version	2.6.8		3.0b5
> Visits	283		148
> Pages		267		145

If you are looking at the referring domain numbers for Google, or for
some other site that you have tracking tags configured for, these
results make sense. In Summary 3 requests with tracking tags are counted
as coming from a referring domain based on the tracking tag, not the
actual domain name.

> 1) Are visits being reported correctly in either version?  My testing
> implies that visits may be over-reported by ~50% in 2.x and under-
> reported by ~23% in 3.x, unless I'm missing some of your criteria for
> defining a visit beyond what's in your Glossary.

There are various factors that affect how visits are counted. The most
dramatic is how you have "Combine proxy clusters into one host" set.
There are quite a few proxy clusters other than AOL. You also need to
watch the Agent strings to see if they are the same or different between
requests from a single IP address within 30 minutes.

I am *very* confident about the visit numbers in Summary 2.6.8. Summary
3 is still in beta testing, so even though it has been fairly throughly
tested at this point, it hasn't have the full set of cross checks yet.

> 2) Are pages being reported correctly in 3.0?  The reported value
> seems to be off by ~50% based on my manual calculations.

For referring domains in particular, pages will follow the visit
numbers. In almost any other report pages will be much more predictable
than visits, but the in the referring domains report a page hit is a
visit where the referrer refers to a page, which depends on the visit
detection for that referrer.

> 3) Should the "visits" column always be equal to the sum of the
> visits displayed when clicking on the domain drill-down?  In this
> case, the sum of the selected referrer visits is 286, compared to 148
> in the parent report.

Yes in Summary 2, but not in Summary 3. Selected referrers includes
tracking tags while referring domains doesn't.

> I love the new (Tag xxxx) entries in this report, as they are quite
> helpful.  They would be even more useful if their drill-down links
> worked.  I'm not sure if this is a technical issue or just an
> oversight in implementation, hopefully the latter.

That sounds like a bug. I will look into this further and see what I can do.

Jason

-- 
Jason@xxxxxxxxxxx
--
Dr. Seuss books . . . can be read and enjoyed on several levels. For
example, 'One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish' can be deconstructed
as a searing indictment of the narrow-minded binary counting system.
   -- Peter van der Linden, Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets
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