Page pings missing

For data modelers & consumers
1

Hi,

when trying to model my time spent, I realized there are sometimes page_pings missing. Below you see an example of one page id:

pageview_id derived_tstamp event
000c6430-229c-4ebd-8eea-d5cd446ce4fa 2019-09-04 05:43:46.593 UTC page_ping
000c6430-229c-4ebd-8eea-d5cd446ce4fa 2019-09-04 05:43:36.588 UTC page_ping
Missing row — —
000c6430-229c-4ebd-8eea-d5cd446ce4fa 2019-09-04 05:43:16.592 UTC page_ping
000c6430-229c-4ebd-8eea-d5cd446ce4fa 2019-09-04 05:43:06.601 UTC page_ping
000c6430-229c-4ebd-8eea-d5cd446ce4fa 2019-09-04 05:42:56.592 UTC page_ping
000c6430-229c-4ebd-8eea-d5cd446ce4fa 2019-09-04 05:42:46.601 UTC page_ping
000c6430-229c-4ebd-8eea-d5cd446ce4fa 2019-09-04 05:42:16.900 UTC page_view

Example query:

SELECT
  *
FROM (
  SELECT
web_page.id AS pageview_id,
page_urlpath,
event
  FROM
`xxx.pageviews`,
UNNEST(contexts_com_snowplowanalytics_snowplow_web_page_1_0_0) AS web_page
  WHERE
DATE(derived_tstamp) = "2019-09-04"
  ORDER BY
pageview_id DESC
  LIMIT
30) AS t
WHERE
  pageview_id = "000c6430-229c-4ebd-8eea-d5cd446ce4fa"

My page activity tracking is set to 30 seconds / 10 seconds.

Do you have any clue, what’s happening here? Is there a technical reason?

Cheers
Andreas

2

Hi @volderette,

How have you determined that there’s a missing page ping here?

If it’s just based off the timestamps & your interval settings, then I can explain. A page ping will only fire if the user is active on the page - tab is open and some activity has been registered (eg moving mouse, scrolling etc).

If those things aren’t happening the timer is paused, and re-activated when they open the tab again/show some kind of activity.

So, page pings give you engaged time - which is in general a much more useful measurement than simply absolute time I find. Simon Rumble wrote a good guest blog on the topic of time measurement that might be useful.

I hope that clears it up!

Best,

1 Like
3

Hi @Colm,

thanks for your feedback! This was indeed the missing piece of information! I didn’t know that page activity is only measured, when the user is engaged, but of course this definitely is the way to go!

Thank you for your help!

Cheers

1 Like
4

Hi @volderette,

If you are interested which events are causing a page ping event to fire, you can check out this code.

Regards,

5

@egor: Great, thanks, that’s super helpful!