A visit is a period of activity by one visitor on your site or app. It starts with the first onsite event Piano Analytics receives from the visitor, and it ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or at the end of the day.
A visit can contain up to 250,000 events. Beyond that, Piano Analytics treats the traffic as non-human and excludes it.
Start of a visit
A visit starts as soon as Piano Analytics receives the first onsite event from a visitor. This is usually a page view (page.display) when the visitor lands on a page, but any tracked onsite event can start a visit.
Each visit gets a visit identifier when it starts. If you need to count visits outside standard reporting, count the distinct values of this identifier.
End of a visit
A visit ends automatically:
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after 30 minutes without any event.
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at 23:59:59, at the end of the day.
After that, the visitor's next event starts a new visit.
If a visitor leaves, for example by closing a tab, and comes back within 30 minutes on the same browser and device, their activity is still part of the same visit, as long as their cookie is still there. For example, a reader who opens an article at 10:00, closes the tab, then comes back from a newsletter link at 10:20 makes one visit, not two.
Visitor identification
Piano Analytics identifies visitors with a cookie. If cookies are cleared, blocked or renewed, for example because of browser privacy settings, the visitor can be given a new visitor ID. This can increase the number of visits counted.
Bounce visits
Bounce visits are included in the total number of visits. A bounce visit is a visit with fewer than two page views, meaning zero or one page.display event. Other events, such as clicks, don't affect this: a visit with one page view and several clicks is still a bounce.