What is Session

During a single visit, a user might browse several pages, view multiple videos, perform various searches, and register. In contrast, they could simply abandon the site after seeing one page. Both count as a visit.

A visit can be incremented by any tracked interaction with the site even though that interaction may not be a page view. Some interactions are not considered page views. For example, a PDF download is not always tracked as a page view  and some “clicks” are considered custom link calls, not page views. However, these interactions are still counted in visits (and visitors) to the site. It is possible (though not often) that a user can interact with the site and have no page views. That use case could result in your seeing more visits than page views for a given item.

The Visit metric by itself does not necessarily convey the quality or level of engagement for the sessions. For example, a high number of visits could hide the fact that most of those visits are ending on a single page view when you want more page views. 

As an industry standard, most web analytics tools define a visit as ending after 30 minutes of inactivity. If a user stepped away from her computer to answer the phone and did not return for an hour, her interaction with the website would count as two separate visits (one for before the phone call and another for when she returned). Even though a user leaves the website, that does not mean the initial visit is over. If they return to the same website within the 30-minute time window, the user’s subsequent interactions will be counted as part of the original visit.

A visit counts for each time period involved. For example, if you have a visitor that starts navigating the site on Monday at 11:45 PM, and then sees their last page on Tuesday at 12:02 AM, you would see a visit attributed to both Monday and Tuesday. However, if the report date range spans both days, the report would show a single visit.

A new visit will start if a user clears his/her cache mid-session and continues browsing, or opens a different browser and browses the same site in the new browser, or if the user changes devices.

Different vendors may use different additional criteria to define visits. Adobe will end a visit after 12 hours of consistent activity, or 2,500 server calls in the visit, or if there are 100 hits in 100 seconds. (The latter indicates bot activity).

There are other definitions of a Visit. A “session” (often called a visit) begins when a user enters the site and ends when the user closes their browser. In this case, if the user in the example above was on that phone call with her mother for an hour and returned to browsing the site, her interaction with the website would count as 1 visit, not 2. This is possible but not a standard set up in Adobe.

Sometimes a session refers to a “Day Visit” or a “Participation”. This counts a visit for every day that a user has interacted with a given site. This is the same as the Daily Unique Visitor metric in Adobe.