The differences in data between Radar and our legacy analytics platform can be attributed to several key changes and improvements made in our data tracking and session management methodologies:
Session Expiry Adjustments
Originally, live stream sessions were considered expired after 30 minutes of inactivity. However, to align our premium and non-premium customers' data collection, this duration has been reduced to 45 seconds. This adjustment notably impacts "ingest.audio" customers.
Session Exhaustion Reconfiguration
The concept of session exhaustion has been replaced with a more segmented approach. Instead of considering sessions as "exhausted" after a certain point, sessions are now broken into 24-hour segments. For example, if a platform streams continuously for seven days, this would be reflected as one user with seven sessions, each lasting 24 hours.
Revised Session Tracking for Multiple Sessions
Consistent with the adjustments in session expiry, a user's additional session engagement within 45 seconds (instead of the previous 30 minutes) for live streams is now considered a new session. This change primarily affects "ingest.audio" customers.
Enhanced User-Agent Identification
The methodology for identifying unique users has been refined. User identification no longer depends on a fixed time window. If the same User-Agent (UA) and IP address reconnect after any time interval, they are recognised as the same user across reports. However, the definition of a session remain time-bound: 45 seconds for live streams and a 24-hour rolling period for podcasts, adhering to IAB specifications.
Improved Bot Filtering
The criteria for what constitutes a "Qualified Session" has been tightened. Now, qualified sessions exclude bot traffic and include only those sessions that last for a minute or longer, or, in the case of podcasts, sessions shorter than a minute but where the episode is also under a minute.