Issues With Advanced Segments
The people at Google were kind enough to answer my question on the recent episode of Web Analytics TV about having different totals for goal conversions.
I needed to clarify my point since I don’t think sampling is part of the issue. I decided some screenshots would also help.
So, here is how I discovered this. I would open up the All Traffic Sources report:
Next, I go to the default Visits with Conversions segment and click apply:
Now, I see these numbers:
It’s in very small type, but near the middle and to the left we see 12,776 visits and 175 conversions. But now, let’s take a look at a Custom Report I put together. It includes visits, unique visitors, total goal completions/conversion rate and pages per visit.
All these screen shots are the same time period. So, again we see 12,776 visits, but Total Goal Completions, in the very middle of the screen, displays 178.
I understand that a difference of three conversions is kind of like crying over a little bit of spilt milk. Nonetheless, to the HiPPO’s I interface with, this is a *big* issue…so I am left wondering, is it 175 or 178 conversions?
To the GA team, thank you for answering my question; however, I think this scenario is slightly different from what was outlined. I can be emailed by clicking on the link above, or on Twitter @brandingme. Thanks!
