Omniture - Instances, visits and pageviews

I always wondered what is the difference between these metrices in SiteCatalyst. Are these just different terms for same data or different data. All my theories started failing when I actually looked at the data in different reports. Are Instances, pageviews same - quick answer is yes but then why the data is different for same date range. Phew!! I was almost lost and then thought of getting answers to these before moving further!! 


First we will talk about the basic definition and then answers to some of the common observations.

Instances - Instance is primarily used in reports in Traffic Sources menu. An instance is counted for number of times a particular value is received in SiteCatalyst. For example, in Referrers report, if a user clicks on the link on a link on google and comes to your site, then for google as referrer one instance is added. If the same user again goes to google and clicks to come to your site irrespective of session, then the instance is incremented further.

Visit - Visit is counted once in a session irrespective of how many times you view a page. For referrer report, if a user comes to landing page from third party site then a visit is counted for the first time but if he comes again  during the same session, visit will not be counted. Hence visits are usually less than the number of instances.


Doesn't this sound similar to pageviews?  Instances are similar to page views in that they represent the number of "hits" that passed the given search engine, keyword, and/or referrer value into SiteCatalyst. Then why Omniture uses instance as a metric? Well, these sound similar but these are not same exactly same (mind it).

Here are some of the facts about instances:

• All the views for a page might not have come from the referrers and hence you can expect your referrer report to show less pageviews than the PageViews report
• In a Referrer report, for a given referral URL, an instance is counted when ever the page is viewed and referring url is passed to SiteCatalyst. The referrer persists untill the user moves to some other page. 
• Now an interesting fact is that if user clicks on back button on the second page to go to the landing page where he came from a referrer, then again an instance will be counted for referrer.
• Summary value in referrer type report might have more instances than detailed view because Sitecatalyst records only top 25,000 uniques referrers for each day for optimization purposes.

The most significant difference between instances and page views is that events other than page views like custom links, exit links, file downloads, media data, etc can pass referrer data (and therefore can record instances), but these non-page view events do not count page views. Thus it is possible, in some cases, for more instances to be reported than site-wide page views. Please note that this is not always true for all non page view events and is case specific.

Omniture - None, Others, Unspecified in reports

This blog is to understand what do these cryptic words do in your Omniture report - None, Others, Unspecified

The first thing that comes to our mind when we see these entries in our reports is - "Something is wrong with my report configuration or Omniture implementation on my site". But this might not be true. This article will help to understand what to these words mean in Omniture reports and why they appear in some of the reports.

None - When some percentage of data can not be associated with any other entry or line item in the report. This is also dependent upon the selection of your metric for the report.

For example
1. In campaigns report if you select orders as one of the metrices then you will see "None" and a good number of orders against it because all orders on your web site are not placed via campaigns and None shows all such orders which were placed via some other channel may be direct traffic, search etc. You change the metric to clickthroughs and None will disappear because clickthroughs are relevant to campaigns only and hence no other data.
2. Campaign report based upon SAINT classification will show none for categories where some of the campaigns are not classified for the classification being viewed.

You can remove None form your report by filtering for "Does not contain None"

Others - Others appears as an entry when the parameter(s) on which the report is created does not meet the criteria used to add it to one of the existing entries.

For example, in Browser report others appears for Browsers which do not match with the list of most common Browsers in Omniture.

Unknown - Unknown appears when the data could not be detected for various reasons. It mostly appears in Visitor Profile reports. The possible reasons could be:
a. User has disabled cookies on his system
b. Connection type report will have Unknown for browsers other than Explorer. Also for pages where the SiteCatalyst code is placed between <head> tags and not <body> tags.

Unspecified - Mostly appears in cases where correlations are used and one of the break down value was not sent. Correlation data is only available when the two reports being correlated received data from your Web site on the same image request.
This is very common in hierarchy reports where hier1 is broken by hier 2.
Any browser detail related report like browser width, will have Unspecified for browser types not recognized by Omniture.