What is a visit?

A visit can be defined as the consultation of a site by a visitor. A visit can include various events with a limit of 250.000 events—after which traffic is considered as non-human and is excluded.

When a visit starts

In Piano Analytics, a visit starts as soon as the first event is received for a visitor. In practice, this often begins with a page view event, such as page.display when a user lands on a page, but any first tracked on-site event can initiate the visit.

Each visit is assigned a visit identifier at its start. If you need to calculate visits outside standard reporting, you can count the distinct values of this visit identifier.

When a visit ends

A visit stops automatically:

• After 30 minutes of inactivity on the site (i.e., no events recorded for 30 minutes)

• At 23:59:59 (end of day cutoff)

If a new event occurs after the 30-minute inactivity window, a new visit is created.

How returning within 30 minutes is counted

If a visitor leaves (for example, closes a tab) and comes back within 30 minutes on the same browser and device, and their cookie is still present, the activity is still considered part of the same visit. This explains why 2 successive landings from the same visitor can generate only one visit when they occur within the inactivity window.

Visitor identification (cookie-based)

The visitor is identified thanks to a cookie. If cookies are cleared, blocked, or rotated (for example due to browser privacy settings), the platform may assign a new visitor ID, which can result in additional visits being counted.

Bounce visits (included in total visits)

Bounce visits are included in the total visit count.

A bounce visit is a visit with fewer than two page views, meaning it contains 0 or 1 page.display event. Other events (for example, click events) do not change bounce classification—if only one page view (page.display) is recorded during the visit, it is still considered a bounce.