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Web Visit Reporting and Billable Sessions
Answer ID 4057   |   Last Review Date 05/18/2020

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

Consistent user activity for five minutes results in one Billable Session.


A twenty minute user visit of uninterrupted activity
(one click per minute)
     • Result: Two billable sessions

Consistent user activity for twenty minutes results in 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

Sporadic user activity for 45 minutes results in 3 Billable Sessions.


A two hour user visit with activity at the start and end of the visit
     •   Result: Two billable sessions

A two hour user visit with activity at the start and end of the visit results in 2 Billable Sessions.


Related Configuration Settings
 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.

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