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What is Session

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How is session calculated & when the session expires?

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Correct answer by
Community Advisor

In Adobe Analytics, Session is known as Visit.

 

The ‘Visits’ metric shows the number of sessions across all visitors on your site.

How this metric is calculated

A visit always ties to a time period, so you know whether to count a new visit if the same person returns to your site. A visit starts when the user first arrives on your site. A visit ends when they meet any of the following criteria:

  • 30 minutes of inactivity: Almost all sessions end in this manner. If more than 30 minutes lapse between hits, a new visit begins.
  • 12 hours of activity: If a user consistently fires image requests without any 30-minute gaps for more than 12 hours, a new visit automatically starts.
  • 2500 hits: If a user generates a large number of hits without starting a new session, a new visit is counted after 2500 image requests.
  • 100 hits in 100 seconds: If a visit has more than 100 hits that occur in the first 100 seconds of the visit, the visit automatically ends. This behavior typically indicates bot activity, and this limitation is enforced to help increase report performance.

A visit does not necessarily coincide with a browser session because of the above criteria. One of the most common differences is where a visitor navigates to your site, leaves the tab open for more than 30 minutes, then resumes browsing. While this action is technically part of the same browsing session, Adobe considers this action two separate visits.

 

You can find more info regarding Visit/Session here:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/metrics/visits.html?lang=en

 

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Level 10

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.

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Level 2

@RobertBlakeley @Krishna_Musku 

Can I double check how Visits behave in a hourly breakdown report. If I have a column looking at hourly visits for a day, if I sum up each row the total is higher than the Adobe total provided at the top of the table. Is this because a single visit may be counted twice if it spans across two hour slots? For example, if I start browsing at 3:45pm and finish at 4:40pm then I'd get 1x visit for 3pm and 1x visit for 4pm but only 1x visit overall for the day?

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Correct answer by
Community Advisor

In Adobe Analytics, Session is known as Visit.

 

The ‘Visits’ metric shows the number of sessions across all visitors on your site.

How this metric is calculated

A visit always ties to a time period, so you know whether to count a new visit if the same person returns to your site. A visit starts when the user first arrives on your site. A visit ends when they meet any of the following criteria:

  • 30 minutes of inactivity: Almost all sessions end in this manner. If more than 30 minutes lapse between hits, a new visit begins.
  • 12 hours of activity: If a user consistently fires image requests without any 30-minute gaps for more than 12 hours, a new visit automatically starts.
  • 2500 hits: If a user generates a large number of hits without starting a new session, a new visit is counted after 2500 image requests.
  • 100 hits in 100 seconds: If a visit has more than 100 hits that occur in the first 100 seconds of the visit, the visit automatically ends. This behavior typically indicates bot activity, and this limitation is enforced to help increase report performance.

A visit does not necessarily coincide with a browser session because of the above criteria. One of the most common differences is where a visitor navigates to your site, leaves the tab open for more than 30 minutes, then resumes browsing. While this action is technically part of the same browsing session, Adobe considers this action two separate visits.

 

You can find more info regarding Visit/Session here:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/metrics/visits.html?lang=en

 

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Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

It still baffles me that they have not at least created a cross-referenced definition in the Analytics Components Guide for Session(s) - even though   and Session are essentially the same thing.  It would very much help clear up some of the confusion for new users of CJA, who are already having a hard enough time working through the new vernacular and understanding the differences.  NOT having the definition of one of the TOP 2 metrics readily available is definitely a bit frustrating, for sure.
Glad this is out here in the Community to be found for easy reference, but it should also be right there in the list just as easy as People and Visits.
@Gigazelle - Just checking, but do we know anyone who might be able to assist in making that kind of an update in Experience League?