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.
Nice posts Parm:)
ReplyDeleteGreat post buddy :)
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