Web Personalization (RTP) - How Visit Duration is Calculated in RTP

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Navigate to the Clickstream module

Go to the Visitors page

Click on a visitor to find the Clickstream module in the bottom right

How is Visit Duration Caluclated
When a visitor visits a website being tracked by an RTP campaign, it records clicks in the Clickstream module in the RTP platform. Clicking on a visitor allows you to view their viewing information in the Customer Journey section, including:

Visit duration is calculated by subtracting the first time stamp from the last time stamp. In other words: visit duration = last time stamp - first time stamp. See the image above for an example of this calculation.

00:00 Visit DurationSingle page viewed
Both RTP and Google Analytics rely on clicks to determine visit duration. This means that if a visitor only views a single page, neither RTP or GA can track when the visitor leaves the page, since there is only the initial time stamp without a time stamp to mark the exit from the page. The visit duration for viewers that didn’t view more than one page during the session is recorded at 00:00 since it cannot be calculated.

Session timed out
Another way that a visit duration can be recorded as 00:00 is if a visitor’s session times out. By default, a session will end after 15 minutes of inactivity. For example, if a visitor stays on a page without making any clicks for 25 minutes (perhaps they are reading an article or watching a long video), that session will time out and be recorded with a duration of 00:00. If the visitor finally makes a click after the 25 minutes of inactivity, a new session will begin.

In Google Analytics, the session timeout can be customized to be longer or shorter than the default 15 minutes.

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