How does dynatrace Session count compare to the adobe visit count?

[michael_2_kumme]

There are session counts by country being questioned because we have found 90% differences between Dynatrace Session count and Adobe Visit count. For example, for a single site Dynatrace shows 38k sessions from Germany on a single day, while Adobe indicates there were 1k Visits from Germany. A 97% difference! Leaders are questioning the Dynatrace session counts.

[zietho]

Dear Michael K.

can I ask you to create a support ticket for this, since to really answer that question we def. need more information!

There could be all sorts of reasons (just one of many like bots and exclusion rules set in adobe but not in DT , Synth calls, etc. ).

So a support ticket, with the DT environment and data provided from Adobe would help here!

regards

Thomas

[AntonioSousa]

In the future, I expect that Dynatrace give far more counts than 3rd party RUM solutions. The reason is quite clear: Dynatrace is serving the Javascript directly from the original HTML servers, and browsers are starting to proactively block 3rd parties. And a lot of users are using extensions and other types of blockers.

At this stage though, I would say that such a difference is not explainable for most normal sites. But would be interested in what you discover 😉

[michael_2_kumme]

Thomas, thanks for the response. Here is the support ticket with the basic info to start.

SUP-60116 

[r_weber · Accepted solution]

There could be multiple reasons for differences in that number. I usually find that depending on what tools are used there are always some differences given how the technologies work.
Some things to consider:

• how browsers and the tracking solution handles "do-not-track" settings
• how ad-blockers handle the tracking solution (e.g. I've seen cases where pi-hole refused loading of the required JS from a 3rd party, while the DT script was loaded from the same domain - an advantage of DT)
• Also worth investigating what a "user session" is defined as. There might be differences in the exact definition. Is a user session counted with a specific timeout (e.g. if it lasts longer than 30minutes is it 2 sessions or still one, how long is the inactivity duration?)
• The inclusion of synthetic sessions? E.g. google scrapers might be counted as user sessions. Dynatrace does a good job to identify real users and "imitated real users" but sometimes that might lead to false identified users (or sometimes also false interpreted by a user - did you filter the sessions accordingly?)
• ...

Regards,
Reinhard

[zietho · Accepted solution]

Thx Reinhard!

could not have explained it better myself!

Point 3:

Dynatrace: https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/shortlink/user-session#when-does-a-user-session-end-

Adobe: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/metrics/visits.html?lang=en#metrics

Main differences:

* Timeout: DT - 6 hours, Adobe - 12 hours

* Break up/ending: DT actions, Adobe: hits