A session is the core unit of user activity in the Websites section. Every metric — Sessions, Bounce Rate, Page Views, Web Vitals — is computed relative to sessions. Understanding how sessions are defined, how they are tracked, and how they expire helps you interpret the numbers correctly.

What a session is

A session represents a single continuous visit by one user to your website. It begins when the Web SDK is first loaded in a browser tab and ends after a period of inactivity or when the session expires.

Sessions are the equivalent of a browser visit: one user who opens your site, browses several pages, opens additional tabs, and then closes the browser has had a single session. The same user who returns the next day starts a new session.

Session lifecycle

Event	Effect
User opens the website for the first time	New session created
User navigates to another page (SPA transition or full load)	Session continues, new page view recorded
User opens a new tab on the same website	Session continues, tab tracked within the same session
User closes all tabs	Session ends
24 hours pass since session started	Session expires; the next visit creates a new session
User returns after the session has expired	New session created, even for the same user

Cross-tab tracking

One of the unique capabilities of the D-Zero Web SDK is that it tracks user activity across multiple browser tabs within the same session. If a user opens your product in one tab, opens a second tab while waiting for something to load, and then switches back, all of that activity is recorded under a single session.

The session detail panel in the Sessions tab reflects this with a Page flow timeline that shows tab switches inline — labelled "Switch to tab 2", "Switch from tab 2" — so you can reconstruct the full multi-tab journey.

Sessions vs. users vs. page views

These three counters are related but measure different things:

Metric	Definition
Sessions	Each distinct continuous visit. One user can create multiple sessions (e.g. one per day).
Users	Distinct identified or anonymous user identities. One user can have many sessions.
Page Views	Each individual navigation within a session — both full page loads and SPA transitions. One session contains one or more page views.

It is normal for Sessions to exceed Users (a user visits multiple times) and for Page Views to exceed Sessions (a user views multiple pages per visit).

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of sessions in which the user left without triggering a second interaction. Specifically, a session is counted as bounced if:

The user loaded a page, and
No further click, navigation, or tracked event occurred before the session ended.

A high bounce rate on a landing page often indicates that users are not finding what they expected, or that the page is too slow to retain them.

Anonymous sessions