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Visits

This article provides an overview of the visit tabs within the Portal, along with what visitor types are and how we differ from GA Sessions.

Visit Tab Overview

The visit log shows activity and journey history of people that have visited the site.

Visits are recorded when a new or returning visitor lands onto your website. The visitor is allocated a unique visitor ID on their first ever visit to the website, this stays with them indefinitely as long as they do not clear their cookies.

We exclude all traffic from Infinity and any IP addresses that are marked as internal within the installation.

New and Returning Visitors

A New Visit is when a visitor lands on the website and is allocated a unique visitor ID which tracks them indefinitely, at the same time they are allocated a dynamic number. When the visitor calls we can map this call to their unique visitor ID.

A Returning Visitor is a repeat visit from a visitor who has previously had our cookie dropped into their browser, they are again allocated a dynamic number and when the visitor calls we can map this call to their unique visitor ID, tracking not only their last land but also any previous lands in an easy to see visitor trace within your Portal.

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Bounce Rate

Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave ("bounce") rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site.

Bounce rate is a measure of the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees.

A benefit of having Call Tracking is that we offer integrations with many third party systems and send an event along with the page view when a call is made, which helps reduce the bounce rate. It is common however to see lots of bounce pages when calls are made as visitors often visit websites so that they can obtain a number to call then leave without browsing.

Internal Visitors

Within the Portal you will notice this symbol Internal Visitor Symbol.PNG, which indicates an internal visitor on the website. This is designed so that internal visits are not included in the aggregated data and therefore do not skew your top line stats.

Any goals that are triggered by an internal visitor such as, a brochure download or phone call will be voided from the system and show as such in your Portal logs.

If you would like to exclude your internal traffic please supply the external IP addresses to our Support Team

Spiders

Within the Portal you will notice this symbol Spider Symbol.PNG, which indicates a visit from a Spider. Spider visits are not included in the aggregated data and therefore do not skew the data.

The Infinity Portal identifies any visits from robots/web crawlers and marks these as Spiders in the visit log with the symbol . We identify these spider visits through a combination of IP database and WHOIS/User agent information.

Our system is based on the concept of mapping a keyword to a conversion. Spider visits don’t convert, therefore it is not in our interest to artificially inflate the visitor numbers within our portal by showing spider views, it is in fact the opposite. We need to remove spider views, as having them as part of the data set in the portal would make conversion rates seem artificially low, as spiders don’t fill in forms or make phone calls. Additionally, we will also never map a phone call to a visitor marked as a spider.

Infinity Visits vs Google Clicks

We do not expect Visits and Clicks to match, the two figures are defined and recorded differently.

Visits is the figure we track at Infinity, showing how many unique visitor sessions were recorded, excluding traffic from Infinity and from our clients if we know their IP addresses.

Click is the figure we import from the PPC network (e.g. Google), showing how many clicks that network count as valid and chargeable, taking into account click fraud, their own activity, etc. This figure has been known to change over time when the networks remove historical clicks as part of their normal procedures.

Infinity Visits vs Google Analytics Sessions

Infinity Visits

An Infinity visits is the same as a "land" trigger.

Infinity Tracking is JavaScript based, sometimes when a Visitor navigates around a web site the referrer data they send back indicates a land, when really they are just clicking back to the first page, or their browser is hiding referrer data.

To avoid generating spurious land triggers (visits) Infinity Tracking performs 're-land' detection, this is the process of comparing the current landing source with the last tracked landing source, and deciding whether or not to count the land or convert it to a page view instead.

The re-land algorithm is activated if the land occurs within 30 minutes of the last visitor activity.

The algorithm detects a re-land in the following situations:

  • If the current landing source is exactly the same as the last land source in the cookie. This helps protect against users clicking on the back button to their landing page.
  • If the current landing channel is the same as the cookie channel, and the referrer is empty. This helps protect against users who have browsers who don't always send referrers on subsequent -pages, but still allows visitors to land from a different channel with no referrer within the 30 minute window.
  • If the current land source is direct. This protects against visitors who's browser clears the referrer mid-session.

Google Analytics Session

A single user can open multiple sessions. Those sessions can occur on the same day, or over several days, weeks, or months. As soon as one session ends, there is then an opportunity to start a new session. There are two methods by which a session ends:

  • Time-based expiry (including end of day):

    • After 30 minutes of inactivity
    • At midnight
  • Campaign change:

    • If a user arrives via one campaign, leaves, and then comes back via a different campaign.

By default, a session lasts until there's 30 minutes of inactivity, but you can adjust this length so a session lasts a few seconds or several hours.

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