Impact on reporting of "Start a new session when the campaign changes"?

Reports and working with data
1

Hello,

What’s the impact of having " Start a new session when the campaign changes" either ON or OFF?

I’ve currently got it on and I suspect that it’s causing some mild over-reporting of goal completions because I’m seeing cases where the same URL that is totally unique to a conversion has two unique pageviews BUT with a different source/medium for each conversion.

2

By default, goals can be triggered once per session. Since the mentioned setting may lead to creating more sessions, it’s also likely that there will be more conversions for those users. Obviously, assuming that they met the criteria for goal conversion within both of their sessions (where additional sessions were created only because the campaign source changed).

3

Makes perfect sense. I assume that it might impact the total session count as well. Is there any impact on the attribution reports?

4

Yes, more sessions might be recorded, but the same no. of visitors.

Regarding attribution reports, more sessions implies more accurate data when it comes to traffic sources.

5

@kuba,

what about " Start a new session when the referrer changes" The two settings are so similar:

  1. Start a new session when the campaign changes
    When a campaign changes during the session, we’ll begin a new session for this visitor. This will help you collect data for all campaigns: the first one and the changed ones.

  2. Start a new session when the referrer changes
    When a referrer changes during the session, we’ll begin a new session for this visitor. This will help you collect data for all referrers: the first one and the changed ones.

6

The second one is about referring website, so a link placed on some 3rd party website that led to yours. The first one is about the campaign set with use of UTM tags.