General FAQs

For the best user experience, and to minimize page load, we recommend an asynchronous setup:

Observe the following recommendations:

In our experience, this is a suitable setup for campaigns that deliver additional messaging to a page such as personalized content, pointers, toggle sliders, and modal boxes.

With this setup, experiments designed to change the content of a landing page or home page banners, may expose the visitor to small amounts of perceived ‘flicker’.

For clients that intend on running a full-site testing optimization program that includes landing pages, home page takeovers, and other areas of the site where the user experience is sensitive to perceived user flicker, then we recommend the following setup:

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Observe the following recommendations:

It is important to understand that this setup comes with a trade-off of increased page latency. Our testing shows that this increased latency is largely imperceptible to the end-user, but this of course depends on the connection used.

Clients often express concerns about the impact of Smartserve on page loading and overall site performance.

Whilst we have released a number of changes in the past year to minimize loading time, it is worth pointing our that the solution is typically custom to the site itself and often related to other site issues.

We do have a number of recommendations, however, that you might consider to further minimize Smartserve loading time:

It is important to understand that each live and recently paused experience and each segment injects logic into Smartserve and therefore contributes to its weight and the number of CPU cycles need to execute it

Visits and entries are both commonly used in the web analytics industry to report site metrics. Visits is defined as set of page views for a visitor and an entry constitutes the page on which that visit starts.

Unfortunately, there is much disagreement as to what constitutes a valid entry, with some definitions including a significant time period since the last page view, or being referred from an external web page. This is further complicated by some external web pages not implying a new visit. For example, if a visitor makes a payment via Paypal, it should not break a visit, nor should selecting a button to share or 'like' web content.

It can also happen that the browser may block the referrer url, making a succession of pageviews within a visit look like a series of direct entries.

To avoid this confusion, we avoid the concept of visits, with its ambiguous definitions and complications, and instead concentrate on entrances and sessions.

An entrance is defined as any sequence of pageviews where the first page comes from an external link, entered URL, or bookmark and where all subsequent pageviews are triggered by a selection within the site.

A view in the same session as the previous view that lacks a referrer url, and therefore might be considered a direct entrance, is not treated as a new entrance but as a continuation of the previous one. The view will only be treated as a new entrance if it has UTM parameters that suggest it really is a new entrance.

A session is defined as any sequence of pageviews with less than 30 minutes between each view.

A good example of how we apply the concepts of entrances and sessions can be seen in our Behavioral Attribution. We count the purchase time from the start of the session in which the visitor purchases. But because a session may have multiple entrances, it can appear as though the visitor entered after the purchase happened, when in reality there were multiple entrances. We calculate last click value, and true last click value based on this fact.