Let's say a site visitor watches an hour-long video.

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This is a group of hits related to one user. Most analytics tools group hits by activity by default. Once the program determines that the guest is no longer active, the session is considered to be over. If the guest becomes active again, a new session is started.

Typically, a session is considered complete after 30 minutes without any activity. This half-hour period is called a timeout.

Most analytics tools calculate total time qatar mobile phone numbers database spent on a site based on the time from first to last hit. This period is also used to determine other metrics, such as time spent on page.

It is often possible to adjust the timeout period to your needs. This feature will be useful if, for example, a video is posted on the portal, especially if its duration exceeds half an hour.
It turns out that the hits don't go to the server during this entire time, meaning the session will end 30 minutes after the first one, despite the fact that the page visitor is active in reality. In order to correctly count the session, it's worth setting a different timeout.

But an even better solution would be to extend the session by sending an additional hit when the video is shown. Remember, the number of hits is proportional to the amount of information you have about the time the user spent on your portal.

So, we have found out: sessions are formed from hits. Now we will talk about how the latter are combined according to certain users.

Users.

Users

A user is an anonymous person defined by an analytics tool. Users are identified by an anonymous number or string of characters assigned to them.

Most often, a user is assigned an identification number (ID) when first detected by an analytics tool. This number is retained until the end of the retention period, after which it is deleted.

The hits ID is sent to the analytics system. This feature allows the analytics tool to match hits, sessions, according to specific site visitors.

How do analytics tools manage to identify portal guests?

For this purpose, most of them use a "cookie". It is a small text file that contains an anonymous identifier. Every time a hit leaves the browser to the server, the identifier stored in the cookie is also sent.

Now let's look at the types of cookies. First party cookies are associated with the domain that generated them, meaning they can only be used by the domain that created them.

The advantage of such cookies is that the vast majority of browsers allow their use, so it can be said that this is a reliable technology.

Note that it is not easy to use first-party cookies when the site is not on the same domain. When a user moves from one of your sites to another, the cookie is “lost”. Therefore, most often, if analytics is not well configured, the cookie is reassigned to the visitor.

In other words, there are two cookies per person, the system counts it twice. For this reason, it is impossible to name a specific number of visitors, that is, we do not have the ability to correctly build analytics.