What are "web visits" and how are they configured?
Environment:
Customer Portal, Web Visits, Billable Sessions
Oracle B2C Service
Resolution:
A "web visit" is a series of enduser interactions that can span one or more billable sessions. The length of a web visit is configurable and allows an organization to track and report on activities by a single user for up to 12 hours.
In earlier releases, a billable session is defined as a unit of 15 minutes of enduser activity. From the May 2010 release onward, that definition instead refers to any 15-minute period of time within a web visit that contains user activity. This change is an improvement in several important ways:
- A visitor who spends more than 15 minutes on an Oracle B2C Service site is no longer viewed as multiple visits, and their activity is more accurately recorded in analytics.
- Service agents are now able to view all of the enduser activity for a visitor - not just the most recent 15-minute session.
- Oracle B2C Service customers will now be able to configure their web visit length to match the same metric in any third-party web analytics tool. (Oracle B2C Service does not guarantee that its web visit statistics will match those of a third-party tool).
Session examples:
A five minute user visit
• Result: A single billable session
A twenty minute user visit of uninterrupted activity
(one click per minute)
• Result: Two billable sessions
A forty minute user visit with activity at the start, in the middle and at the end
(at 0 minutes, 20 minutes and 40 minutes into the visit)
• Result: Three billable sessions
A two hour user visit with activity at the start and end of the visit
• Result: Two billable sessions
Configuration Setting | Notes |
---|---|
VISIT_INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT | Defines the period of inactivity (in minutes) after which a visit to Customer Portal will expire. A visit is used to group together the series of activities by a particular visitor to the Customer Portal pages. A new visit will be generated under following conditions: - The visitor is inactive for longer than VISIT_INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT minutes - The hard limit defined by VISIT_MAX_TIME is hit - The browser is closed - A visitor's browser does not have support for cookies and the visitor navigates away from Customer Portal The minimum value is 15; default is 30. |
VISIT_MAX_TIME | Defines a hard limit for the length (in minutes) after which a visit to Customer Portal will expire. A visit is used to group together the series of activities by a particular visitor to the Customer Portal pages. If a visit extends past the VISIT_MAX_TIME setting, a new visit and corresponding session id will be generated. The maximum allowed value for this field is 720 minutes (12 hours). Default is 240 minutes (4 hours). |
CP_LOGIN_MAX_TIME | Defines a hard limit for the length of the user login cookie (in minutes). If a visit extends past the CP_LOGIN_MAX_TIME setting, the user will be required to login again. Default value is 0, which means that the login cookie will expire based on user inactivity specified by the CP_LOGIN_COOKIE_EXP configuration setting. |
If you have questions around what generates a session and how you can prevent inaccurate session billing on your site please review Demystifying Session Usage (PDF). Some simple mis-steps in customization and configuration can increase billable sessions. For more information, see Session usage information.