Unexpected results when using Dashboard Widget and “Sessions with event”

This short post documents some finding from my google+ post.

I wanted to create a simple dashboard for key stakeholders to see not only overall sessions but sessions when a certain event (a micro conversion) had occurred. The site in question has several events being tracked with this micro conversion being quite popular.

First I created a widget with all sessions showing

Next set up another widget, this time using “sessions with event” and then filtering by the key micro conversion using the event category match.

Widget settings sessions with event – Google Analytics Dashboard

As you can see from the screen grab below the results were not what I had expected. Why just 13 Sessions?

Sessions with event widget – Google Analytics Dashboard

I then looked at the original sessions widget and using the segmentation tool filtered by the micro conversion using the event category.

Segmentation edit conditions filter – Google Analytics

This time results were right, 747 events.

Sessions widget using segmentation – Google Analytics Dashboard

So what is different in the widget filter and segmentation?

As Gerard Queen commented, the difference is in the filter options. In segmentation the filter includes traffic with that event regardless of if any other event has been triggered.

The filter with the widget however shows traffic that “only” has the event triggered and nothing else.

Widget settings “only show” sessions with event – Google Analytics Dashboard

Anaylsing the data above I have had 5,171 sessions, 747 of which include my event (with and without other events) and 10 of which only include my event.