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abhilive95
New Participant
July 17, 2023
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same session has multiple user-agents

  • July 17, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 1038 views

The session is combination of post_visid_high, post_visid_low, visit_num and hit_time_gmt. we are generating session using these 4 attributes. But we see there's been multiple user-agents associated with the same session generated with above attributes. 

Note: we are using user-agent attributes from adobe to derive the device type (SMARTPHONE, DESKTOP, IOS etc)

what could be the reason of multiple user-agents associated with the same session id?
Thanks.

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Best answer by leocwlau

Guessing that someone doing some testing on your website by changing the user agent from the browser's developer menu. Basically, all modern browsers have such a feature and user-agent is just a string from the browser which can be forged.

As long as you are not seeing a significant amount of such traffic, it should be fine.

1 reply

leocwlau
leocwlauAccepted solution
New Participant
July 17, 2023

Guessing that someone doing some testing on your website by changing the user agent from the browser's developer menu. Basically, all modern browsers have such a feature and user-agent is just a string from the browser which can be forged.

As long as you are not seeing a significant amount of such traffic, it should be fine.

    A
    abhilive95Author
    New Participant
    July 17, 2023

    Thanks @leocwlau 
    Is there any alternative way to detect or derive the device type categorization from Adobe analytics feed data.
    Any thoughts or visibility on this would be great..

    Jennifer_Dungan
    Jennifer_Dungan
    New Participant
    July 17, 2023

    Not really... 

     

    User Agents are the way to identify a device, and emulating different device types is a standard way to test the site behaviour (breakpoint, specific logic based on device identification, etc) when you don't have a physical device.

     

    I suppose you could try to assume that the first record is the "correct" one.. but emulation mode can persist on devices, so it's no guarantee... You could also maybe try comparing the device resolution to see if it scales with the screen size? If a user is on a desktop device but emulating a mobile device, the screen width and height should be a mobile aspect ratio but the recorded resolution might still be the full device resolution?

     

    Or you could just make the assumption that if the same session has multiple identities that it's likely your testers and that you can treat it like desktop traffic... or exclude the data completely?

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