Advanced Session Control

Managing Attribution for Clicks within Sessions

Overview

In digital marketing, accurate attribution of conversions and touchpoints is crucial. However, one of the most common challenges faced by online marketers is ensuring that a session is not interrupted by a new click-in. Often, click-ins that occur shortly after the session was opened seem to drop a cookie in order to get the attributed sale. This can lead to inaccurate or undesired attribution results and undesired ad spendings.

What is Advanced Session Control?

Advanced Session Control is a feature that addresses this issue by ensuring that a running session cannot be interrupted by a new click-in. Only the first click-in will remain as the attributable touchpoint. This behavior reduces the risk of suddenly incoming touchpoints being counted toward the same conversion, offering more accurate tracking and attribution.

Key Benefits:

• Ensures that a conversion is only attributed to the first valid touchpoint that opened a session.

• Reduces misattribution by ignoring any subsequent clicks that occur during the same session.

• Helps maintain data integrity, particularly when dealing with high volumes of clicks and traffic sources.

How It Works

Each touchpoint in a user's journey typically represents a logical session. In traditional tracking models, every new click-in starts a new session, even if it happens shortly after another click-in from a different channel or partner. Advanced Session Control changes this behavior.

With Advanced Session Control enabled, a running session will no longer be interrupted by a new click-in. Instead, only the first click-in will be considered the attributable touchpoint for that session, and subsequent clicks within the session will be ignored. The session will "freeze" for a defined period, after which it is considered complete.

Session Freeze Timeout

A session freeze timeout defines the maximum allowable time interval between two events that belong to the same session. If a click-in occurs after this timeout, it will start a new session. This timeout can be configured to fit the needs of specific advertisers, partners, or ad spaces.

Configuration Options

While no user interface (UI) configuration will be available in the initial stage, the feature can be enabled and configured internally for specific advertisers, partners, or ad spaces. The configuration options include:

• Session Freeze Duration: Define the appropriate session freeze duration to determine how long a session can remain active before it is considered complete.

• Advertiser, Partner, or Ad Space Specific Settings: Apply the session control logic to specific entities, ensuring targeted control over attribution at the advertiser or partner level.

Internal Modes for Applying Advanced Session Control

We offer three internal modes that control how the session control logic is applied:

1. Strict Mode: Only the first click-in of a session will be counted as the valid touchpoint. Any subsequent click-ins are ignored, ensuring that only one touchpoint per session is attributable.

2. Ignore Running Session (Non-Winner Flag): This mode ignores a running session if there is no non-flagged winner present. If there is no definitive winner to assign the session to, the session is ignored, and a new session will be created with the flagged click.

3. Ignore Running Session (Non-Offsite Clicks): This mode ignores a running session if it was initiated by a non-offsite click, such as organic traffic or autointegrated partners. If this occurs, the flagged click starts its own session and becomes the winning touchpoint.

If you wish to activate Advanced Session Control, please contact us.

Transparency and Data Availability

To ensure complete transparency, information about affected conversions and touchpoints will be available through BigQuery. This allows you to analyze and understand the impact of Advanced Session Control on your data:

• Conversion Level: A new processing event will be recorded with the reason alias IgnoredInSessionTouchpoint under processing.processingEvents.

• Touchpoint Level: The decline reason for touchpoints will be shown as NotWinnerPosition under userJourney.processing.click.requestDeclineReasonAvro.

These logs allow you to track how the new session logic is applied and see which touchpoints and conversions were impacted by the session freeze.

Conclusion

Advanced Session Control provides a powerful way to improve attribution accuracy by preventing new click-ins from interrupting ongoing sessions. By configuring session freeze timeouts and applying custom logic to specific advertisers or partners, you gain greater control over your attribution model, ensuring that your data remains clean, accurate, and reliable. If you need assistance configuring this feature for your account, please reach out to our support team.