Session (web analytics)

In web analytics, a session, or visit is a unit of measurement of a user's actions taken within a period of time or with regard to completion of a task.

[1] Generally, a session is understood to consist of "a sequence of requests made by a single end-user during a visit to a particular site".

[11] Sessions are also used for operational analytics, data anonymization, identifying networking anomalies, and synthetic workload generation for testing servers with artificial traffic.

Once this period of inactivity is reached, the user is assumed to have left the site or stopped using the browser entirely and the session is ended.

[20][21] This has the problem of assuming that the thresholds follow a bimodal distribution, and is not suitable for datasets that cover a long period of time.

[22] A simpler approach, which does not take backtracking into account, is to simply require that the HTTP referer of each request be a page that is already in the session.