The Visits

The Concept of Visits

A visit, the term used interchangeably with the term session, starts every time a user opens a website with added UseItBetter tracking code and ends when the user closes the browser’s tab with the website or the visit expires due to the user’s inactivity, lack of internet connection etc.

A single user can start multiple sessions (for example by opening an internal link in a new tab) and continue them in parallel. Each of those visits would be presented in the Visits report separately.

Overview of Visits Report UI

The Visits Report provides you with visits matching your segment’s criteria. These visits can be analyzed individually, one by one, using Events Log, low-fidelity Visit Preview and high-fidelity Visit Replay.

• 1) The total number of matched visits is displayed above the visit.
• 2) At the top of the Visit view are listed all (A) attributes related to the visit.
• 3) Below the attributes, on the left side, is the Events Log which contains all (M) meta and (E) interactive events tracked during a visit, ordered by time and grouped by Sections.
• 4) Visit Preview is displayed next to the Events Log. This presents a trace of mouse or finger movements and the user’s interactions with the website’s elements from a Section selected from the Log, overlaid on top of a screenshot of that Section.
• 5) A high-fidelity replay of a visit, which emulates tracked user behavior, can be opened by clicking the Replay button.
• 6) You can click the right arrow located next to the Replay button, to view the next visit in the segment.

Visit Log

• 1) The Log contains all (E) interactive and (M) meta events grouped into Sections.
• 2) Time on the left of a Section bar indicates time of Section event measured in minutes from the beginning of a visit. Time spent in the Section is displayed after the section name.
• 2) The purple background under the time of the Section event indicates that the Section contains one or more events matching the segment’s criteria.
• 3) Click the Section bar to expand it and see events that happened in the Section. This will also change the section in the preview mode. To open a section without affecting the Preview click +.
• 4) Each event is displayed with the time of the event since the beginning of a session. Purple background indicates that an event is matching segment’s criteria.
• 4) Some events displayed in the log including (E) click, (E) change, (M) Error, (M) Action events will be marked with a dot so it’s easy to spot them. Those events will also be displayed in the Visit Preview next to the log.
• 5) You can hide events of the same type by clicking the crossed eye icon on the right. To show those events back in the log adjust the log settings which you can access by clicking (8) cogwheel icon.
• 6) The link icon on a Section bar opens the URL corresponding to the Section in order to open your website in the Preview Mode (do not confuse with Visit Preview).
• 7) To quickly find certain events enter the query into the filter input, for example email, Error or a query containing wildcards email*.change. Sections containing the matched events and the matching events themselves will be highlighted with a light yellow color both in the Log and in the Visit Preview
• 8) By clicking the cogwheel icon you can access Log settings and adjust what is being displayed in the Log.

Visit Preview

• 1) the timeline displayed about the Preview shows time since the section was opened till the moment it was closed. The color of the line matches the color of the mouse or finger trace displayed in the preview.
• 2) you can use the slider to change the time for which the activity is displayed in the preview.
• 3) the line on the preview indicates mouse pointer or finger movement (during the touch phase). The color of a line is based on the time of an event and indicates in which order visualize movements and events happened – it ranges from blue (earlier events) to red (later events) and matches colors on the timeline above the Preview.
• 4) dots indicate events that happened in the section; colors of the dots indicate the type of an event (click, change, mouseover etc.) and the color code is the same in the Preview and in the Log.
• 5) the light grey border indicates the size of the browser’s viewport (how much of the section can the user see at once).
• 6) F stands for “fold” and the line indicates how much a user scrolled down in a section.
• 7) R stands for “reach” and the line indicates how far a user scrolled down in a section.

Screenshots in the Background

Screenshots are taken using a screenshooting API at the moment a Section is opened in the Preview. The API attempts to open the URL corresponding to the Section, and replicate conditions in which the page was displayed to the user during a visit by adjusting the screen size and emulating the UserAgentString (UAS).

This approach, used instead of capturing the real page content during a visit, guarantees that no personal information or other sensitive data potentially displayed on the page are captured. The approach allows for a near-zero performance footprint of the tracking code.

The approach comes with limitations Correct screenshots can be taken only from pages that are:

• session independent
• publicly accessible

Also, screenshots might no be accurate if:

• there are elements on the page positioned vertically based on the browser’s viewport height,
• there are elements displayed only upon the user’s interaction (for example dropdown menus, top layers).
• layout or content of the page has changed since the time of the analyzed visit.