Privacy-First Session Tracking
Sessions help understand what page views are connected to each other. Watching a journey through a site or app helps connect ideas together, and gives an idea of what’s happening and why.
What counts as a session
When a visitor arrives on your site, Pushbroom hands their browser a unique number. The number is a random UUID, generated fresh with nothing derived from the visitor. Subsequent page views get a reference to that number. That’s it.
Where it lives
The Session ID gets set as an ETag header in the browser. The browser holds the tag and offers it back on the next request. This lets Pushbroom connect different page view events to the same Session.
How long is a Session?
A session lasts two hours from the initial page view. Somebody reading for three hours gets a second visit rather than a rolling one that never ends. After that the identifier is not renewed, and a returning visitor is a new visit with a new random identifier.
A Session is not a Person
A session collects events into a single story. It does not say who performed the events, and it is not joined to a profile, an account, an email address or a previous visit. Pushbroom does not keep a record of visitors, so two visits by the same person are two sessions.
You cannot ask Pushbroom how many unique people visted your site over a month without instrumenting that yourself.
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