reporting

Improved tracking of Unique Visitors in the Audience Dashboard

Related products: CC Analytics & Reporting
Improved tracking of Unique Visitors in the Audience Dashboard

📺 We're excited to announce that we have updated the unique visitors' dashboard. 

  • We increased the accuracy of unique visitors' reporting by cross-referencing a visitor tracking cookie with the unique visitor id. 

Why are you doing this?

We get several questions from our customers on the unique visitors' data. 

We aim to provide the most accurate visitor numbers for our communities, and this enhancement closes several of the identified sources of discrepancies, namely:

  • If a user visited the community several times before registering, we would count all those visits as unregistered visits and not link them to a registered user (when a visitor registers).
  • If a user used different devices, we measured the access from each device separately.

 

How are we achieving more accurate results?

To track unique visitors, we used a tracking cookie, and every time we saw the tracking cookie again, we would add it to that visitor. 

We now merge two data points: the tracking cookie and the unique user id. Once a user logs in, we link the cookie to a user id and update all the prior visits attributing them to the registered user. In the same way, if a user has multiple devices and logs in to the platform, we attribute all the different tracking cookies to a unique user id.

 

In which situation are inSided numbers less accurate?

Accurately tracking visitors to a web page or any SaaS product will never be perfect because there are cases for which counting is not possible and the user does not want to be tracked, namely:

  • Users clear their cookies often.
  • Users disable tracking cookies.
  • Users use incognito mode to access websites. 

InSided visitors analytics will be more accurate over longer time intervals and provide a good overview of trends for visitors into a community.

 

What more do I need to know? 

This product update is an improvement for the Audience Dashboard and builds on this product update.

 

Any plans to improve the Audience Dashboard further?

Not yet planned, but we are considering the following ideas:

If any of those is crucial for you, please upvote to harness the power of the community. 

 

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback or any questions you have about this release.

Hi there, Thank you for the update!
Did the improvements already take effect? And do the changes also affect historic data?

Best,
Daniele

@Daniele Cmty yes and yes.
We did a change in the query so historical data will also be affected.

I just want to chime in to say GREAT JOB on the improvements here. 

Active user metrics were a particular paint point for me at my last company and early in my implementation with my new company. We solved that pain point with the Salesforce integration, but I know that many customers won’t have that integration to give them user metrics like Visits. 

Looking at the new Audience dashboard, I can confirm that your Registered Unique Visitor metric matches our Active User (details on our definition) metric exactly. We’re currently a private community, so it should match exactly. Well done!

This is awesome because:

  1. We’re moving to a hybrid (Public setting, private forum) this week. With this new metric, you’ve provided insight into Registered Visitors and Page Views by Registered Visitors that will help us measure usage of the public aspects of the community from a logged-out state. 🎉 
     
  2. You’ve given those with the Salesforce integration a nice out-of-the-box solution for measuring engagement of their registered/known users vs guests. 

Very well done! 

I’m really glad to see you’r considering the ability to filter the dashboard. Allowing that by role (including custom) would be HUGE. And the other elements you’re considering would be great to have as well. 

@Alex Campos For the Unique Registered Visitors, which part is determining the Unique count: tracking cookie/IP address or User ID?

@DannyPancratz it is tracking cookie and user ID.

@Alex Campos re: this excerpt

We now merge two data points: the tracking cookie and the unique user id. Once a user logs in, we link the cookie to a user id and update all the prior visits attributing them to the registered user. In the same way, if a user has multiple devices and logs in to the platform, we attribute all the different tracking cookies to a unique user id.

 

If someone starts as a guest / unknown user, visits X times, and then registers or logins in and becomes known, do their previous X visits retroactively update to known users in the dashboard? 

@Alex Campos Just hoping to clarify one thing. My Community is still in private mode, why would I have guest users since everyone has to log-in to see content… 

Are they going to the log-in page and abandoning? 

@Alex Campos just bumping this question 🙂

@Alex Campos re: this excerpt

We now merge two data points: the tracking cookie and the unique user id. Once a user logs in, we link the cookie to a user id and update all the prior visits attributing them to the registered user. In the same way, if a user has multiple devices and logs in to the platform, we attribute all the different tracking cookies to a unique user id.

 

If someone starts as a guest / unknown user, visits X times, and then registers or logins in and becomes known, do their previous X visits retroactively update to known users in the dashboard? 

 

Hey @DannyPancratz - I checked with our engineers and they confirmed that yes, in this case the previous visits do retroactively update.

@Alex Campos Just hoping to clarify one thing. My Community is still in private mode, why would I have guest users since everyone has to log-in to see content… 

Are they going to the log-in page and abandoning? 

Hello @Alex Campos, 

I have the same question:
users need to log in, but why are Guest visitors displayed in the Audience Dashboard under Analytics? What are Guests exactly, how are they defined?
Thank you

Hi @Eva,

I just stumbled over your question, apologies that this somehow must have slipped our attention.

Guests are all users that cannot be identified as a registered user. Two important points here:

  • If a user has an account, but is not logged in, we can still identify the user (by cookie) and will not count that visit as a guest visit.
  • If a user registers e.g. during their second visit, the first visit will also be counted as a registered visit.

In the case of private communities, it is true that they will only be able to see the login page. So this number can be seen as unregistered visitors who are leaving the page again after seeing the login screen.

Terms & ConditionsCookie settings