Website Statistics Report: Session Details
Overview
The Session Details report is accessed via drilling into a Visitors Session. It is available from the Session Activity
and Session Activity Today Reports which allow you to view the Session you wish to analyse. This shows all the details that have been recorded by WebVisitor.info for an individual visitors Session to the website. A Session is one persons visit to the website. If the visitor leaves the site then returns later on in the same day or another day this is treated as a separate Session. A new Session is started if no pages are requested for twenty or more minutes.
This report is very useful for seeing how visitors navigate around the website and can be used to identify any problem pages or bottlenecks and so is always worth keeping a close eye on to see what your website visitors are up to.
Visitor Details
The first section of the report shows the details about the visitor, as is shown in the following example:
Example of the Session Details from the Session Details Report
Session Details
The Session Details section shows you the following information about the Visitors session:
- Session ID. This is a unique identifier assigned to each session by WebVisitor.info.
- Start time of the Session. This the time that the first page was requested by this visitor to your website.
- End time of the Session. This is the time that the last page was requested by this visitor. Note, this does not include any time the visitor spends reading the last page they requested before navigating away from the website.
- Duration. The difference, in minutes, between the start and end time of the Session.
- Page Request: The number of pages this visitor requested during this session. Additionally you can actually see each page the visitor requested and the time it was requested in the Pages Viewed section of the Session Details report.
- Return Count. This is the number of times this visitor has visited this website.
Computer Details
The following details of the website visitor’s computer and computing environment are shown:
- The Visitors IP Address.
- Operating System. The Operating System the visitor used. A collated report for all website visitors is available in the Operating Systems Report.
- Web-browser. The web-browser and the version number that the visitor is using. A collated reported for all the web-browsers used to access the website for all visitors is available in the Web-Browsers Report.
- Screen Resolution. The screen resolution that a visitor is using. A collated report showing screen resolutions for all visitors to your website is available in the Screen Resolutions report.
Where they came from
The following details about the route the visitor found the website are shown:
- Referrer. If they followed a link from another website this will be shown here. You can click on this link and be taken to the web-page that links to your website. This includes Search Engines, where the visitors search query will automatically be rerun for you to see the results. A collated report showing all referrers to your website along with the number of times each has been followed by visitors to your site can be found in the Referrer Report.
- Search Engine. If the visitor found the website by using a search engine the Search Engine name, i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc will be shown here. The Search term that was used will also be shown. Collated reports showing the popularity of each Search Engine and all the Search Terms can be found in the Search Engine and Search Terms reports.
Geographical Details
If the location of the visitor is known the visitors Country and City will be shown in this section. There are a number of reports that show collated information about visitor locations, Visitor World Map, By World Region, By Country and By Country and City.
Pages Viewed
The second section of the report lists every page that the visitor requests during the Session. For each page requested the time, page title and page url are shown. Looking though this list will allow you to see exactly what the visitor did on the website during the session. You can even click on the page url and get taken to the page on your site that it refers to.
Note: Only pages that have the tracking code on are shown in the Pages Viewed list, which it why it is important that the tracking code is installed on every page (or as many pages as possible) on your website.
Read the Code Installation Guide to find out more about this.
Report Options
There are no options available with this 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.