Website Statistics Report: Session Activity

About this Article This document is part of www.WebVisitor.info, a free detailed, real-time website statistics analysis tool. It is available at various cost levels, including a free version and is quick and easy to setup on any website. Visit www.WebVisitor.info to find out more and sign-up to start tracking visitors to your website now.

Overview

The Session Activity report lists all visitors that have accessed the website during the selected date range. You can drill into to each Session to pull out the detail for each via the Session Details Report that will tell you exactly what pages have been requested, the Geographic location of the Visitor and details about their computer system, such as Operating System and Web-Browser etc.

Identifying Visitor Sessions

It is possible to setup WebVisitor.info so that visitor sessions are identified by the visitor’s actual name. By default WebVisitor.info will generate a random and unique identifier for each visitor, for example “Visitor: 879da4c9-1e43-455f”, as shown in the following example:

However if you are using the “Identified Visitors Tracking” it is possible to actually name the visitors by their real name, for example “Visitor: Gerry McNicol”. This makes it possible to track individuals use across the website and is an extremely powerful way to get to know your visitors. This can be seen in the following diagram:

To do this you need to setup Visitor Tracking Identification to work with this website, see “Setting-up Identified Visitor Tracking” in the “Code Installation Guide” documentation which will take you through the process on how to set this up.

It is worth noting at this point that for this to work the name of the Visitor needs to be known to you and passed across in the tracking code. The Visitors name is not extracted from their computer as this would most likely have Privacy issues! Therefore if your website has a shop or is membership based, MySpace or Hotmail for example, this is an extremely powerful way to learn about your visitors to your website.

Equally if this website is a web-based application, such as a corporate Intranet, it is useful for determining what employees use the system and the characteristics of their use. Computer Type and what pages they look at for example.

Finding out more…

To find out more about each Session, click on the visitor name to drill into the Session Details Report, and to find out what is contained in the Session Details Report, click here.

Report Options

As with most reports you can choose the date range that this report runs. If you decide to perform work on your site to increase the average visit length use the date feature to step back to a time period before the work was carried out to determine if your enhancements are successful.


There is also a printer friendly version which is available by clicking the icon in the top right of the report.

Additionally you can filter the report to show:

• Only Identified Visitors
• Only Unidentified Visitors
• All Visitors, both Identified and Unidentified

You can also choose to show the visitors computer details which includes against each row the Visitors Operating System, Web-Browser and IP Address. This is useful if you are trying to identify any issues with your site related to specific Operating Systems or web-browsers and so can be used in conjunction with the Operating Systems Report and the Web-Browsers Report.

How this Report Works with the Log

Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record with each new visitor so increase the log size to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.

If you are performing optimisations to your website that are aimed at increasing the average visit length make sure you have enough log space to store both historical data and sufficient new data to put your optimisations to the test.


To understand how to get best use of this report read Managing Website Session Log help document.

Optimising your site for this Report

This report requires no special treatment to get the best out of it other than the standard bullet points of …

• Ensure that the tracking code is placed on every page of your site
• Ensure that your log is as big as possible.