How is a ‘Visit’ defined in Matomo?

A Visit is defined as a continuous session of user activity, based on available identification methods such as Matomo’s first-party cookies or User ID. Cookies store the visitor ID and timestamp of the last activity. Session timeouts and cookie settings directly influence how visits and visitors are counted.

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.
  • A visit is based on a session of activity on a single device. If a visitor accesses your site from different devices, each session is recorded as a separate visit.
  • When cookies are present, Matomo links actions into the same visit as long as there is no period of inactivity or campaign change.
  • If cookies are blocked, cleared, or unavailable, Matomo may create a new visit even if the visitor’s activity continues.

Actions tracked during a new visit do not alter the data recorded in previous visits. For example, if a customer adds an item to their cart but does not complete the purchase during the same visit, that visit will be recorded as having an abandoned cart. Even if the visitor returns later and completes the purchase in a new visit, the earlier abandoned cart remains unchanged in 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.

View Visitor and Visit counts

Go to Visitors > Overview to see the total number of visits and unique visitors for the selected calendar period.

matomo visits count overview

  • You can also use Segments to filter by visitor or visit characteristics depending on your analysis goals.
  • In Custom Reports, you can select metrics such as Visits or Unique Visitors to focus your reporting.

See the Glossary of Analytics terms