How is a ‘Visit’ defined in Matomo?

In Matomo, a Visit is defined as a continuous session of user activity. By default, if a visitor performs any action more than 30 minutes after their last tracked interaction, Matomo starts a new visit.

  • A Unique Visitor that returns several times in one day can be recorded as multiple visits (after every session timeout).
  • In their first visit to your website or application, the visitor is considered a New Visitor.
  • From their second visit (possibly on the same day or even days or weeks later) they will be tracked as a Returning Visitor, provided the tracking cookies are still in their browser.

Actions tracked in a new visit will not change any of the data tracked in the previous visit. For example, in Ecommerce, if a customer adds an item to their cart but does not complete the order within the same visit then that visit will always have an abandoned cart. Even if the visitor returns at a later time (in a new visit) and completes the order, the previously tracked abandoned cart will remain in the tracked data and reports.

Changing the default Visit timeout

For Matomo Cloud, you can request to change the 30-minute Visit timeout by contacting support.
For Matomo On-Premise, you can change the default timeout by adjusting your config file:

[Tracker]
visit_standard_length = 1800

Why change the Visit timeout?

If your website or app involves longer periods of passive engagement such as reading long-form content, you might increase the timeout to 45 minutes. This ensures that these long but continuous interactions are counted as a single visit. However, with longer timeouts, Matomo may group periods of inactivity into a single visit.

A shorter timeout may result in more visits being recorded for the same visitor. This can be useful for distinguishing separate task-based sessions or analysing frequent user return patterns. Using this approach depends on how you want to interpret and report on user activity.

Note: Custom timeouts may make your data less comparable with industry standards or other analytics tools. Shorter timeouts lead to more visits while longer timeouts reduce visit counts, and will impact metrics like bounce rate and session duration.

See the Glossary of Analytics terms

Next FAQ: What is a hit?