"Reach" statistic in "Personalized Experience" dialog of Experience Editor is not showing correct values

Question

I've recently been looking at some of the personalization statistics offered in Sitecore's Experience Editor and noticed that some of the numbers are not correct. I'm not sure if this is an issue in Sitecore, or an error in the documentation that describes the statistic. Specifically, I am looking at the "Reach" statistic that's shown in the "Personalized Experience" dialog of the Experience Editor.

According to the documentation (found here), Reach is "the reach of the currently selected rule, which is expressed as the number of visitors that meet the condition and the percentage of all visitors that this number represents". The calculation is documented as "Reach = (Visitors that match the condition/All visitors) x 100". The dialog mentions that it does this calculation for the last 30 days if A/B tests are not in place (which is true in my case).

The personalization rule that I've set up is a simple one that changes the data source of the component when a particular page is visited during the current visit. When I look at the statistics for the rule, however, I see that the dialog shows 8 visitors that met the condition, which accounts to 97% reach. I can't see how that's correct, considering that Sitecore Analytics shows over 4,000 hits to the page specified in the rule during the 30 day period. The default condition shows about 8,000 visitors that met the condition, which accounts for 3% reach. That also seems incorrect based on what I'm looking at in Sitecore Analytics.

So there's basically a couple of issues I'm trying to understand with that statistic: How are the number of visitors that match the condition so small, when analytics show many page hits to the page? Secondly, how can "Reach", as defined in the documentation, be 97% for the 8 visitors that matched the condition vs. 3% for the 8,000 that met the default condition?

Any knowledge you can share about this issue will be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

So I reached out to Sitecore Support, and it looks like this issue is resolved in Sitecore 9. However, for those of you using Sitecore 8, here is how you can resolve the issue:

1. In the Content Editor, navigate to the "/sitecore/system/Settings/Content Testing/Report Queries/Ruleset Exposure" item.
2. Copy and keep the existing query that's in that item, just so that you can revert the change if needed.

3. Replace the query with this one:

   SELECT
       [RuleId],
       SUM([Visitors]) as [Visitors]
   FROM 
       [dbo].[Fact_RulesExposure]
   WHERE
       [Date] >= @StartDate AND [Date] <= @EndDate AND
       [ItemId] = @ItemId AND
       [RuleSetId] = @RuleSetId
   GROUP BY [RuleId]
   

4. Save the item, and make sure the statistics in the "Personalized experience" dialog now reflect the correct numbers.