How is Visit Number populated?

[jlitchfield]

Is there an object or attribute on a visitor's browser that populates that value sent to the dimension 'Visit Number'? How is the value for this populated and sent to Adobe? 

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

This is calculated during processing. Adobe keeps track of users and it keeps track of their pages views/hits. Depending on your session expiry / timeout settings (default being 30 mins), when a completely new user is seen, obviously the first hit will increment the visit number to 1. If it's a known user, then the hit is evaluated against the last known hit for that user... if within 30 mins, no new visit is determined... if over 30 mins, then the visit number is incremented.

Each page of the visit will share the visit numbers.

• Visit 1
  • Page 1 (Visit_Num = 1)
  • Page 2 (Visit_Num = 1)
  • Page 3 (Visit_Num = 1)
• Visit 2 (30 mins or more since Page 3)
  • Page 1 (Visit_Num = 2)
  • Page 2 (Visit_Num = 2)

There is nothing in the browser that you can read.