Someone asked on Twitter that is it possible to make so called “non-interaction” events in Adobe Analytics and we had a good discussion about this. (Sorry guys, at the end I was bit confused who should write what about this issue…but I can ask the stupid questions and maybe Jan can write the answers ;))

I have struggled with this issue too and few weeks ago I decided to ask this directly from Adobe’s clientcare and they confirmed that non-interaction events aren’t possible in Adobe Analytics. (I know, those are possible e.g. in Google Analytics)

If you are wondering what these kind of events are, well, those would be hits that wouldn’t affect other metrics such as bounce rate%. No, you wouldn’t want to use these events for form submissions or any other important actions on your site (I presume), but there are many cases where non-interaction events would be great. One example would be if you want to track and populate events based on the scrolling of you page (e.g. blog article). Another example from my job, I got asked to populate event when the user has been on our frontpage 10 seconds and that way we could see are visitors bouncing away immediately or not. I implemented that and we got the data what we wanted, but the cost was that bounce rate on the frontpage was useless after that, because every time the 10 second hit was populated it affected to bounce rate. Just two examples, I’m sure there are million others.

How about segmenting the hits away?

I had never thought this one, but I guess it’s worth to try. I’m quite sure this shouldn’t be possible.

Segment that exlude the 10 second hit. Well, this didn’t help. Looking the “pages” report I can still see the low bounce rate for the frontpage.

Segment that exclude 10 second hit and the whole visit. Well, this of course worked in the way that bounce rate is high and not affected by this hit, but at the same time we lost all the visits that were on frontpage at least 10 seconds, so this wouldn’t make any sense too.

This was just a superquick segmentation test. In a hurry right now and packing for Adobe Summit (yeah!), so hadn’t really time to investigate this one in reliable way. However, even if this would be possible with segmentation or even if there would be some kind of detour with the help of hacking javascripts and image calls, it would be just too hard. We want the simple non-interaction hits to be possible in simple way, right?

Single Access% to the rescue (on some cases)!

If I’m forced to use these hits/events that affect bounce rate in the wrong way then I follow Single Access % metric, which is quite nice alternative for bounce rate and in some cases it’s even much better (IMO). You can read about the metric in here https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/reference/metrics_single_access.html and you can do calculated metric about that in this way:

Together we can, please vote:

Adobe will make changes based on the ideas we users give and there is already idea about this one, please vote if you can log in and are Adobe Analytics user:
http://ideas.omniture.com/t5/Idea-Exchange-for-Adobe/Ability-to-exclude-events-from-bounce-rate-calc/idi-p/8801

To be continued…

Jan (Adobe’s consultant) tweeted that he might have some answers or detours for this issue (?), and hopefully we can discuss these challenges more at the Adobe Summit this week. Maybe Jan will write some follow-up post related to this…
Ps. You can follow Jan’s amazing Adobe Analytics blog in here http://webanalyticsfordevelopers.com/