Understanding Visitor Monitoring and Chat sessions
Knowing the number of visitors that arrive on your website is important in order to understand how effectively you’re marketing your business and converting these visitors into customers.
In the tawk.to dashboard, the Visitors count shows the total number of unique visitor sessions on your site over a period of time.
What is a session?
A session starts when a visitor lands on your website, page or chat widget (using the direct chat link). The session remains active until the visitor leaves the site or the visitor is inactive for at least 20 minutes.
After a session has ended, there is a 2-minute buffer period which will allow the visitor to continue the existing session.
Using this system, a single person can complete multiple sessions and be counted as multiple visitors on the same day.
When does a visitor becomes idle?
A visitor’s status is changed to idle after 10 minutes of inactivity on your site. A visitor is considered inactive when they have not performed any actions on the website (including moving the mouse).
What happens if a visitor becomes idle on my website?
In Monitoring, visitors are sorted into three categories:
Served — visitors currently engaged in a chat session.
Active — visitors actively browsing your website.
Idle — visitors who are inactive on your website and not engaged in a chat.
If a visitor becomes Idle and remains inactive for an additional 10 minutes, the session will end. Your visitor will continue to appear in Monitoring during the 2-minute buffer period.
What happens if a visitor becomes idle during a chat?
On the left side of the dashboard where active chats appear, you will see a circle beside the visitor’s name indicating their status.
A green circle shows a visitor is active. They are participating in a chat session or browsing the website.
A yellow circle indicates that a visitor is idle or inactive both in the chat session and on the website.
After 20 minutes of inactivity, the chat session will end and no longer appear on the left side of the Dashboard.
However, the visitor will continue to appear as Idle in Monitoring until the 2-minute buffer has ended.
When will a chat be stored in the Inbox section of my Dashboard?
If a chat has ended and the visitor remains active on your website, the session will continue to appear in Monitoring. The chat will only be stored in the Inbox area after the session ends.
Now that you understand how tawk.to defines and counts visitors, you can start using the statistics in your dashboard to support your marketing efforts on your site.