Visitor Configuration

The documents in this section cover the following topics related to customizations for your website visitors.

• Adjusting the User Session
• Configuring Browser Capabilities Detection
• Turning on Visitor Sampling
• Custom Variables
• Custom Visitor Segments

Adjusting the User Session

A user session is defined as the period of visitor inactivity allowed before the session ends. When a user visits a page on your site, a session is established. Session length is determined as follows in these situations:

• The user ceases activity on the page for 30 minutes, and additional activity is attributed to a new session.
• The user exits the page and returns within 30 minutes, and the return visit is counted as part of the original session.
• A user remains actively engaged on the site for 2 hours, and all activity is counted as part of the same session.

User session length is relevant to how unique page views are counted. The unique page view count for a page represents the number of user sessions in which that page was viewed one or more times. For example, if a user visits your site in a single session and views the same page 10 times, then the page view count for that page will increase by 10. However, the unique page view count for that page will only be 1. If you decrease or increase the length of the user session, you will impact session timeout tolerance for your site and likely generate fewer or more unique page views.

To define user session length, use the _setSessionCookieTimeout() method.

Configuring Browser Capabilities Detection

Google Analytics automatically tracks a number of statistics about the browser capabilities of visitors to your site:

• Browser type
• Operating system
• Browser-operating system combined metric
• Screen Colors
• Screen Resolution
• Flash Versions
• Java Support

You can use a number of methods to enable or disable client detection, including Flash, general browser capabilities, or Flash player capabilities. You can also verify whether this detection is enabled for your site. See the GATC Web Client method reference for details.

Turning on Visitor Sampling

If your website has a very large volume of traffic into the millions of page views per month, you can turn on visitor sampling to reduce load on all systems involved. In Google Analytics, data sampling is done intelligently, so that you are still able to track the same user behavior and trending activity that you would without sampling. This is because sampling occurs over unique visitors. So, if Visitor A is sampled and Visitor B is not, then sampling will always include Visitor A and not Visitor B. Data sampling with Google Analytics is set with a percentage. Use the _setSampleRate() method to enable sampling at the desired percentage.