A visitor to your web site is typically a human being, manipulating a web browser to retrieve information and accomplish tasks on a web site.

A visitor can be a person:

sitting at a home desktop computer screen
using a cell phone or other mobile device
using an internet-enabled device such as a Wii, or television-enabled web browser

A visitor can also be a computer:

Visitors and human beings are often considered equivalent, however, in the web analytics world they often are not.

When a visitor arrives at a site (usually via a Landing) the time they spend on the site is considered a session. For the purposes of ConversionRuler, a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Each visitor is identified using a Cookie when they first visit your site. ConversionRuler sets two cookies:

A "User" cookie which identifies the visitor across sessions and never changes.
A "Session" cookie which identifies the visitor during their session, and expires after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Visitors vs. Human Beings

In the following cases, a visitor is not equivalent to a single human being:

Two or more people share a common computer; their activities and behaviors on the same site are not identical.
One person has more than one internet device and accesses the internet from multiple places:
- Person visits a site at work, then purchases a product from the same site at home
- Person does research from a cell phone, then purchases from a desktop computer