Visits & Visitors

This section explains the pieces every report in Attribution is built from: visits, the channels they are sorted into, the models that split the credit, the options that decide which visits take part, and the views that hold it all together. It starts with the smallest piece.

Three words carry most of what Attribution does.

• A pageview is one page load that the snippet records, with the page's URL, the referrer and the time.
• A visit is a stay on your site: the pageview that opened it, which carries the referrer or the tracking parameter that says where the visitor came from, plus every pageview and event that follows until a new visit begins.
• A visitor is the person behind the visits, recognised from one visit to the next.

What makes a visit a visit

A visit is what other tools call a session, and it is one thing more. Every visit is sorted into a channel by how it began: a search result makes it Organic, a Google ad click makes it Google Ads, no referrer and no parameters make it Direct Traffic. That sorting is what turns a session into a touchpoint. When a conversion happens, the credit goes to the channels of the visits that came before it, so attribution runs on visits, never on single pageviews.

The sorting rules are the default channels every project starts with and the filters you add yourself, as described in Channels, filters & groups. Visits are not fixed at the moment of tracking. Pageviews are the permanent record; visits are built from them with the channels and filters you have today, and rebuilt when they change. Add a filter for a parameter that was always in your URLs and, after the next refresh, past visits move out of Unsegmented Traffic into it. This is why the Dashboard Builder works on your history, not only on traffic still to come.

When a new visit starts

• A new source. A pageview that arrives from somewhere else, another ad, another site, a link with a tracking parameter, starts a new visit, even minutes after the previous one.
• Thirty minutes of quiet. After thirty minutes without a pageview or event the visit is over; the next pageview starts a new one, sorted by its own referrer and parameters.
• The same source again. A pageview that would land in the same channel as the visit still open joins that visit rather than starting another.

So a visitor who clicks a Google ad and twenty minutes later clicks a Meta ad has made two visits, each credited to its ad. Analytics tools that count sessions may show that as one.

What a visit records

The referrer, the destination URL with its parameters, the time, the pages viewed and the events fired during it. The referrer is where the visitor came from, the destination is where they landed: a click from a Google result to your homepage records google.com and yoursite.com/, which is enough to make it Organic. From visit to conversion follows one visitor's visits all the way to the credit they receive.

How a visitor is recognised

The snippet gives each new browser an anonymous id and keeps it, so later visits from the same browser belong to the same visitor. When your site calls identify() with a user id or an email, the visitor becomes a known person, and visits from before the sign-up, and from other devices once they are identified there too, are brought together under that person. How to send identify is on the install page. For businesses where several people from one company share a journey, Company-based attribution does the same at company level.

Seeing it on the dashboard

Click any blue number on the dashboard to open the visitor sidebar. It lists the visits in order, each with the channel it was credited to, the pages viewed and the events fired inside it, and the path across all of them.

If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to [email protected].