Difference in Sessions when comparing on campaign level and entry page level

vero · November 22, 2023, 11:36am

Hi everyone,
I am rather new to matomo and do not have a lot of experience yet, so sorry if this is a known thing.
We are operating campaigns tagged with utm parameters for a client.
All traffic goes to the same landingpage.
We discovered, that there is a difference in sessions through the respective channels, when you look at the campaign level data or the entry page level data.
For the entry page level, we have fewer sessions than on campaign level.
My explanation would be, that this could be due to the cookieless tracking, so that campaign, source and medium data will be displayed regardless of cookies set or not and that the entry page is not associated, when cookieless tracking takes place?
(First table showing campaign level, second showing entry page level).
Looking forward to your answers!
Thanks a lot in advance
Vero

heurteph-ei · November 28, 2023, 8:41am

Hi @vero
Is this related to:

github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Revisit: Updating referrer attribution of a visit when 2 channels are used within a same visit (current behavior is to override a "Direct" channel whenever possible)

opened 11:39AM - 22 Aug 22 UTC

sgiehl

Enhancement

This is a follow-up issue to the discussion in #18612 ### Summary When a v…isitor visits the page, the visit will be attributed to a certain referrer. This can currently be `website`, `campaign`, `search engine` or `social network`. If non of this referrer can be detected the visit will be attributed as `direct`. When a visitor afterwards revisits the page coming from another referrer and the referrer was previously attributed as `direct`, we currently may update the attribution to this new referrer. See workflow below: ### Current Attribution workflow ![Referrer Attribution](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1579355/169563862-c9cb78c0-a3f0-4ae8-a4ec-f4f0c64fc743.png) ### Conclusion Updating the referrer in that case might not be correct, as the visitor initially came directly to the page, but would then be attributed to another channel. As far as I know the code to update the referrer was initially added to fix some issue, where the referrer was not yet set with the first tracking request, but was sent with a later one. Not updating the referrer in that case, would then mean incorrectly attributing the visit as direct, instead of the correct referrer. A possible solution could be to only set/update the referrer until the very first page view tracking request of a visit. This would solve the issue, that other tracking requests might have already created a visit without a referrer, as it would then be updated with the page view request. Changing any behavior in referrer attribution might result in differently tracked data and thus changing numbers. As this might bring trouble, we should not change that outside of a major release. Also we should consider to do that using a config flag, that will only be activated for new installs automatically, so it won't harm any existing install by default.

utrautma · November 28, 2023, 1:53pm

Hi @vero ,
that sounds interesting.
However, since I often investigate such things, the first thing I have to say is that it has nothing to do with whether you track cookieless.
Please note the following: if a visitor accesses your page with a different campaign link during their session, a new session is created. However, since Matomo recognizes this visitor - even with cookie-free tracking during a session - a new visit is created, but not a new unique visit.
Exactly the same applies to the entry pages, if you use different campaign links (another entry is counted).

Only when the session ends (after 30 minutes of inactivity) does cookieless tracking create a new unique visit or unique page entry

In your screenshot above I see two tables, but both seem to be from the campaign area. The second screenshot doesn’t look like entry pages.

vero · November 28, 2023, 2:21pm

Hi Udo,

thanks for your reply so far!
Both screenshots are from custom reports.
In the second one, you can drill down into the sources to see the entry pages, but I was too lazy to blur them out, and I thought that the distinct landing pages would not give more information.

In my scenario, I am looking only at visits with the same campaign.
So from my understanding, looking at the same information but from different angles (campaign vs. entry page).
So I am not sure if this applies to your scenario with a second entry with a different campaign link?

Best
Vero

utrautma · November 28, 2023, 3:03pm

Hi @vero,

thanks, now I understand it better.
Custom Reports is an additional plugin in Matomo that generates reports independently and in a different way than the normal standard.
Can you please take screenshots of the definition of the two custom reports and post them here?

It would be interesting to know whether the normal reports under Behavior - Entry Pages and under Acquisition - Campaigns show different numbers. These are the normal Matomo standard.

Another important thing is that the periods that you look at with Custom Reports should be completed. This means that the current day should never be included. This is because Matomo does not generate these reports “live” on demand but rather in the background on the server.
But I guess you’ve already thought of that.

vero · November 29, 2023, 4:38pm

Hi Udo,

thanks for helping me out!

The campaign report under Acquisition > Campaigns shows the same visit numbers for the respective channels as in my custom report.

For the entry page report, my client looked at the dashboard overview and used a segment containing “entry page url contains xyz”.
I was not able to make a connection to the campaigns in the entry pages report (Behaviour > Entry pages).
(I just discovered that they left out some definitions in the segment, which I just added and am now waiting for the report to be regenerated. But those landingpages were also included in the custom report and gdn and linkedin were already included and those numbers added up).

Regarding the data frame, I just checked with a new data frame excluding the last couple of days and have a similar pattern.

These are my setups for the custom reports (first: campaign level; second: entry page level. Second one has no filter):

Best
Vero

utrautma · December 4, 2023, 2:47pm

Hi @vero
I think this is a very special, somewhat complicated case, where you have to go very deep into the tracking data. This is beyond my free capabilities within the forum.

The definition of the custom reports doesn’t let me see any obvious problem.
I can only speculate: my guess is that there are some visits for which Matomo cannot assign an entry URL to the visit or, more precisely, to the campaign source.
Because in the second custom report the entry URL is the third dimension level below the second dimension of the campaign source, only those campaign sources are probably output in the report for which Matomo also finds an entry URL in the visits.

However, I don’t understand why this is the case.

You could now analyze the visitors log in detail for the visits where you see differences. You may be able to get to the bottom of the topic by finding out the visits that might be missing in the second report.

You can also write to Matomo Support for the Custom Report Plugin directly (website or email). After all, this is a plugin where you are entitled to support from Matomo. You can refer to this thread here.

Regards Udo

vero · December 6, 2023, 2:08pm

Thanks for your time, Udo!
I understand and your second opinion is pretty much valued!