Understanding Visitor Monitoring and Chat sessions
The instructions below are for desktops and laptops only.
What’s a visitor?
A visitor is anyone who interacts with your website while the widget is active.
This includes people who:
Land on a page with the tawk.to chat widget installed
Open the chat widget or click a direct chat link
Interact with a Knowledge Base on your domain
A session begins when visitors open your website or engage with the chat widget. Even if someone doesn’t send a message, they’ll still be counted as a visitor once their session begins.
Note: A single person can be counted multiple times in your visitor count if they start multiple sessions during the day (for example, by closing the browser and returning later).
To learn more, see this guide:
Viewing visitor stats on your dashboard
3. The Visitors count on your tawk.to dashboard shows the total number of visitor sessions on your site for the day.
Learn more about the statistics on your dashboard with this guide:
In Monitoring, visitors are grouped in one of three categories:
Served – Currently chatting with an agent.
Active – Actively browsing your site, not in chat.
Idle – Inactive on your site and not in a chat.
What happens when a visitor becomes idle?
If they remain idle for another 10 minutes (20 minutes total inactivity), their session ends.
They will continue to appear in Monitoring as idle during the 2-minute buffer.
Visitor status in the left panel
The left panel of your dashboard shows active chats and provides the status of each visitor:
Green circle (near the country flag icon) = The visitor is active in chat or browsing.
Yellow circle = The visitor is idle in chat and inactive on the site.
If a chat is inactive for 20 minutes, the session closes and disappears from this list, but the visitor stays idle until the 2-minute buffer ends.
Chat sessions and the Inbox
If a chat session ends while the visitor is still active on your site, it remains in Monitoring until the session buffer expires. Once the session fully ends, the chat moves to your Inbox.
Note: Chat transcripts, tickets, and email notifications are only sent after the session ends. If a customer requests a transcript, it will only be delivered once the session has fully closed.
Additional considerations
Differences from Google Analytics
tawk.to considers a session ended after 20 minutes of inactivity, while Google Analytics uses a 30-minute timeout. Because of this, you may see slight differences in session or visitor counts between the two platforms. To learn more, see this guide: Why does my visitor count not match up with Google Analytics?
Understanding how sessions, statuses, and chat activity work in tawk.to helps you monitor site engagement and respond more effectively to your visitors.
Get more insights with these guides:
How does tawk.to define visitors?
Understanding the statistics in your Dashboard
Why do I have more visitors than page views?
Enabling the Sleep Mode feature
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