Events from 2 browser tabs in Pathfinder report

Let’s assume a user has opened a new tab of my website. User now has 2 tabs opened, both of the tabs share same session id. Now user does a series of interactions in these tabs, switching from one tab to another and back.
Would Pathfinder register these events as “2 branches” or will it think it’s just a single sequence of events?

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Saish Redkar

Hi ivstas

Pathfinder will stitch together all the events coming from these tabs based on their event time and treat them as a single sequence.

ivstas

Saish Redkar but it means sequence can be incorrect, right?
Let’s say user clicks on a link in first tab and open “order details”, and then switches to another tab and go to “user settings”, I will have a sequence of “order details” → “user settings”, even though such navigation didn’t happen and order details page may not even have such a link.

Saish Redkar

Yup, based on which event the SDK picks up first. Not sure if there is a way to enforce the priority since the same session id is persistent.

dangrainger

This is the same with any digital analytics tool ivstas, they build user paths from the sequence of events that they receive regardless of browser tab (as Saish Redkar mentioned).

What you’re trying to achieve would require some sort of “Browser Tab ID” which would have a many-to-one relationship with Session ID….but even then it’s not foolproof. In your example an unexpected user journey is created courtesy of the two tabs having fundamentally different parts of your site open. But imagine a scenario where a single section of your site purposefully opens a page in a new tab (which is not uncommon on travel sites when a user opens a hotel page from a hotel results list)….in this case you definitely want the journey to continue.

I’d argue that the “weird” journey in your scenario is actually the right way to gather things. If the purpose is to understand how a user truly uses your website, is it not right that we’d want to see these circumstances suggestive of multi-tab usage? Boxing things just to suit expected user flows (in a single tab) would lead to you missing the true behaviour.

ivstas

I gave this idea a second though and I believe you’re right. From the analytics perspective, if the user interacts this way with a website, it’s actually their session and may be an important insight on how to improve the UX.
Anyway, thank you folks for clarifying things!

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