New analytics engine (beta)

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 22:34:50 GMT

Overview

With our December release, we’re introducing a new and improved analytics engine, that will bring faster and more accurate real-time reporting your client sites. For this engine we're using distributed storage and computing similar to Google Analytics that will allow us provide better quality for analytics and open the possibility for new business intelligence features.

This initial release is focusing on the analytics reports (Visitors, Traffic Sources and Website Content) while the remaining reports will be migrated over time.

The new reporting engine is still work in progress and rough at the edges. We stepped back with the previous heuristics to allow for greater flexibility. Once we start validating it with you we could tune it better. However, there are notable differences between the new reports and the classic reports. The purpose of this beta release is to get your feedback while running the system in production with real data.

New features and differences between the new engine and current reports

Visit definition - we have updated the visit defintion to provide more accurate visit reports;
Higer number of visits and pages views - the current reporting engine does ignore data based on some visit patterns. For example more than 5 visits in one hour from the same IP will get the visit discarded completely. With the new engine, these limitations will go away so that we can support visits from organizations and ISP that have multiple clients using the same IP address
User agent - We improved the device, browser and bot detection to provide up-to-date and accurate reports based on request header. For example browsers that were previously identified as Safari are now correctly identified as Chrome, etc.
Bot visits / hits counting - Bots are accounted with a maximum of 2 visits per day. Compared to the current solution, this will result in lower visits numbers.
(new) Mobile device report - Visitors section now includes a new report that shows what devices are your customers using to access the site
Updated chart library - The charts libraries to include support for HTML 5 and mobile devices; this change is also available on the current reporting engine
Geo location - we use a new geo location database which will cause some differences with countries and cities as ISPs periodically reallocate IP classes to different regions.

You can enable the new analytics engine from Site Settings > Beta Features > Reports section by checking the New Analytics Engine box.

Frequently asked questions

How visits are calculated in the new engine?

The below table shows how a visit is calculated using our new engine compared to the current reporting and Google Analytics:

Metric	On our new engine	On our current Engine (see details)	On Google Analytics (see details)
How long does a visit last?	30 minutes	30 minutes	30 minutes
When is a visit reset?	after 30 minutes of inactivity after 12 hours of continuous browsing	after 30 minutes of inactivity	after 30 minutes of inactivity at midnight when campaign changes

Why do I see a big difference between Business Catalyst Analytics reports and Google Analytics?

The main reason and the bulk of the difference comes from the fact that Business Catalyst Analytics is integrated solution and it aggregates the visits that come into all site domains/URLs. A Business Catalyst site, with a single custom domain (mysite.com) has the following URLs:

mysite.com
(optional): www.mysite.com
mysite.businesscatalyst.com
mysite.worldsecuresystems.com

By comparison, when setting up a GA account, most of the times a user will set it up for a single domains from the ones above, while some traffic comes through the others. GA will not count those visits & visitors, while Business Catalyst will do it. To avoid this situation, you should set-up redirects towards a single domain or set-up GA to count the visits in all domains under the same profile.

Here are some articles on how to set-up GA with multiple domains on Business Catalyst:

One other reason, probably with a smaller impact, is some content might not be tracked by GA while it is tracked by BC. One example here are the email campaigns that could be viewed in browser. Since the campaign likely does not uses the site page template and does not include the GA code, it is not counted there.

What's missing and known issues

Web Form Usage, E-commerce and E-mail Campaign Geo Location Reports are not displaying data
The Visitors > Geolocation report displays a lot of not-set values
The Visitor Loyalty returns data from a different time period
The Traffic Sources > Search Phrases report does not include “search phrases” coming from http://search.aol.com
We haven't migrated any of the module usage reports (ex: Site Manager > Pages > Page Details > Page Usage Report or Module > Events > Event Details > Event Usage Report)
Custom reports are not migrated on the new engine

Where to report issues

Please use this thread to post your feedback or requests about this feature. We would like to have it as open discussion about what's currently in the release, and what is absolutely required to make it work for you.

Note: Beta features are not officially supported and we do not offer a guaranteed response time. We usually respond within the next 48 to 72 hours, but this might vary depending on the team load and issue urgency.

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