Understanding the difference is key for accurate user behavior analysis: a session is one continuous interaction, while a visit combines all sessions from a single user's journey, revealing the complete conversion path and context often missed by session-only tracking website analytics.

Analyzing visits. This indicator plays an important role in many of our articles, and we decided to write one entirely devoted to it. We will try to show you the difference between visits and sessions, why exploring the whole user’s visit provides richer customer journey data, and how analyzing the complete path is crucial for accurate user behavior analysis.

Why session-only analysis shows an incomplete picture

The difference between sessions and visits (if we take into account web analytics) is enormous. You can say that analyzing a session is like watching just the first 30 minutes of a movie. Imagine: you meet Paul, the main character, make friends with him, go on a journey together and suddenly, bang! End of action. You have no idea what happens next, whether Paul marries his crush or maybe ends up alone.

The situation is similar when it comes to analyzing user sessions. A session is only a fragment of the user’s entire visit on the site, only a half an hour of our movie. If we want our analysis to be complete and accurate, we need to take into account the whole visit, because it may consist of many tabs (and each of these tabs will be a separate session, which makes user tracking insufficient) that the customer opens to compare the products or services we offer.

As we said at the beginning – in order to see the entire path that the customer goes through on our site, we need to analyze all the tabs/sessions/the whole visit. Why?

Why only analyzing visits will give you the full picture?

Some customers explore sites using just one tab. But the vast majority of them, open a lot of tabs to compare products, descriptions and photos. For a complete analysis, we need to check what our client has done on all the tabs. Why? Let’s consider two cases.

Assumptions: the user opens 7 tabs, each tab is analyzed as a separate session, the user makes a final purchase.

When analyzing each tab separately, we can wrongly conclude that there are not one, but seven users, of whom only one made a purchase and the rest left our site without being the lucky owner of our product. Going further we draw another conclusion – the conversion rate on our website is slightly over 14%. By formulating further untrue statements, we come to the conclusion that in order to increase the conversion rate, we have to increase our advertising expenses and maybe even redesign our website. After all, since as many as six users have left it, something must be very wrong with it. Do you see how many incorrect conclusions we reached because we were analyzing sessions, not the visit, like cost per user acquisition? Now let’s take a closer look at the second case.

Assumptions: the user opens 7 tabs, all tabs are analyzed as one visit, the user makes a final purchase.

Analyzing all tabs as one visit provides a full picture, allowing us to truly see website visitors' complete interaction. We can see that this is one and the same customer who opened seven tabs just to compare products before making a purchase. The conversion for this analysis will be 100% (one customer = one finalization of the transaction). Since this is the best possible conversion rate, we don’t have to think about additional expenses for advertising campaigns or changes on the website.

Visits vs. sessions: Making the right choice for your analytics

As you can see, correctly analyzed sessions and visits significantly influence the interpretation of data and business decisions. What is worth remembering is that:

• cux.io analyzes whole visits (not single sessions);
• the visit may consist of several sessions;
• the analysis of sessions only can lead to wrong conclusions and bad decisions.

FAQs

Q: Do all analytics tools track Visits instead of Sessions?

A: No, many traditional web analytics tools primarily focus on sessions. Specialized behavioral analytics tools, like CUX, often emphasize tracking full visits to provide deeper context for user behavior analysis uba. Always check how a specific tool defines and captures user interactions.

Q: How does analyzing Visits help understand the conversion path better?

A: Analyzing full visits reveals the entire sequence of actions a user takes towards a goal, even across multiple sessions or days. This shows the true complexity of the conversion path, including research phases, comparisons (multiple tabs), and points of return, which session-only analysis often obscures.

Q: Can analyzing Visits help identify user frustration more effectively?

A: Yes. User frustration might build up over multiple sessions within a single visit (e.g., returning to a confusing form). Analyzing the complete visit provides the necessary context to see these recurring struggles, which might appear insignificant when looking at isolated sessions.