June 24, 2020 — OWOX BI Attribution. Manage session timeout for custom events

Previously, when OWOX BI calculated an attribution model, the custom events connected to the model were assigned to sessions based on the combination of “utm-tags + region + timestamp”. As a result, all the custom events that fall into the same date got assigned to a single session.

This session formation method led to cases when it was impossible to assess the impact of individual events on a user's path through the conversion funnel or to associate the events with online user behavior data.

Now, you can avoid such cases by selecting the session timeout for your custom events:

• 24 hours: all events within one day are associated with one session. This method is applied to custom events by default. Use it if it’s not critical for you to evaluate the impact of individual custom events on transactions or other sessions.
• 30 minutes: events are grouped into a new session every 30 minutes. Use this method if there are many custom events in your funnel and you do not want to have a separate session for each of them or combine all of them into one session.
  Important: When using this method, the 30-minute timeout is not calculated between the events in the funnel. Instead, a 24-hour day is broken down into 30-minute intervals. Thus, the event happened at 10:29 and the event happened at 10:31 will be assigned to different sessions.
• New session for each event: a separate session is created for each event. Use this method if you have individual events in your funnel that can affect a transaction in an ongoing online session. For example, a phone call that helped a customer make a purchase decision.
  Important: When using this method, it’s possible to get duplicate Session IDs for two or more events that have the exact same combination of utm-tags, region, and timestamp.

You can set the session timeout time either when you create a new attribution model or connect a new custom events source. Or you can change it in the settings of an already connected custom events source:

Note: When changing session timeout for the custom events source that’s already connected to the attribution model, you need to calculate the model again in order to apply the changes.