What is a "Visitor"?
When talking about Digital Analytics, a "visitor" is not a person per se since a unique individual can access your content via a PC, a smartphone, a tablet, etc. As a result, a visitor will be measured thanks to the browser ID or the phone ID.
There are several methods to measure a "visitor".
Technical point of view
AT Internet offers several ways to create a unique identifier for a "visitor".
On browsers (web and mobile):
- Third-party cookie: we generate a unique identifier, stored in a server-side cookie (idrxvr, atid or atidx) on one of those 2 domain names: .xiti.com or .ati-host.net. This unique ID allows cross-domain reports and is sent in the AT Internet hit headers.
- First-party cookie: we generate a unique identifier, stored in a cookie (client-side or server-side) on your own domain name. This ID is unique per domain name (or per sub-domain is needed) and doesn't allow cross-domain reports.
If you want/need to handle the identification of the visitors yourself, you may generate the ID and store it in the _pcid cookie (if you are using the PA SDK) or in the atuserid cookie (if you're still using smarttag.js). It is also possible to set this ID thanks to a native method of our SDK, described in this documentation.
This ID has to be sent in the &idclient= parameter of the AT Internet hit when client-side cookies are used. If this parameter is present in the hit that is sent to AT Internet, it will have the priority over the value of the 3rd-party cookie.
All ATI cookies are listed in our developers documentation.
On mobile applications
We use an ID based on the phone and the application.
This ID is stored on the phone and can be seen in the &idclient= parameter of the AT Internet hits that are generated by the mobile app.
It is unique to each phone-app couple.
Depending on the OS, several IDs can be used:
- Android, you can decide whether you want to use the Android ID (ID given by the phone, will remain the same even if the app is deleted and reinstalled) or the Advertising ID (provided by Google, for an Android device. It is unique, but can be reset by the user. It is also subject to the user's choice to disable ad tracking, in which case the user cannot be identified).
Find out more in the online help. - Apple, you can either use the IDFV (the ID will be shared across all the apps of the same publisher), or the IDFA (the ID is unique to the phone)
Find out more in the online help.
Like on browsers, you can also define your own ID, called the UUID.
Cookies
If the visitor browser refuses the cookies, no information can be transmitted to AT Internet via the idrxvr cookie or the &idclient= parameter, except if you benefit from the ePrivacy Exemption using a cookie first.
Otherwise, we base our calculation on the combination of the IP address and the User-Agent, or the IP address and the Client-Hints if the User-Agent is not available (for more information, you can reach this documentation).
This information is less reliable than the cookies but allows a visitor calculation anyway. The accuracy of this information being reduced, we limit the usage to a daily granularity.
How to analyse those visitors in Piano Analytics?