Chat's Guest Sessions provide visitors with a more personalized and seamless experience. These sessions ensure visitors are always targeted with the right Journey and can restart a conversation if needed. Use sessions to hyperpersonalize visitor targeting with specific Trigger node properties for session history, site count, and targeting returning visitors.
Table of Contents
- What is a Guest Session?
- Identifying Visitors
- Widget Behavior for Different Scenarios
- Targeting Visitors
What is a Guest Session
A Guest session begins when a visitor first lands on a page URL with the Chili Chat widget installed, even if that URL is not considered in the Trigger Node targeting, and ends when a visitor has been inactive on the webpage for 30 minutes or more.
Closing out of the webpage in less than 30 minutes does not end the session, as they may return within the same session.
Identifying Visitors
A single visitor can have infinite sessions, and each session generates a guestId in Chili Piper. If known, each guestId should be associated with all related sessions.
It is expected that if a guest is using another device or an incognito browser, they will have a new guestId, so session data only relates to known guest information.
For example, an anonymous visitor comes to your website on a Monday and engages with the Chat widget but does not provide an email. If they return on a Wednesday using the same device and give us their email, we will associate their previous activity with that email.
We will also track the session count for all visitors, meaning if a visitor engages with your URL and Chat Widget five times, their session count will be five.
Widget Behavior for Different Scenarios
Below, we created a table of what visitors should expect to see in the widget based on their sessions.
|
Session Behavior |
Live Chat Started? |
Guest Leaves Webpage? |
Chat Widget Behavior |
|---|---|---|---|
|
< 30 min inactivity in the same session |
Yes
|
Yes |
If the visitor returns within same session, they should be able to continue where they left off. |
|
< 30 min inactivity in the same session |
Yes |
No |
No change to the visitor's experience. |
|
< 30 min inactivity in the same session |
No |
Yes |
If the visitor returns within same session, they should be able to continue where they left off. |
|
< 30 min inactivity in the same session |
No |
No |
No change to the visitor's experience. |
|
>30 min inactivity |
Yes |
Yes |
The session expires, and the widget restarts. |
|
>30 min inactivity |
Yes |
No |
The session expires, and the widget restarts. |
|
>30 min inactivity |
No |
Yes |
When the visitor returns, perform new Journey selection |
|
>30 min inactivity |
No |
No |
If the visitor returns within same session, they should be able to continue where they left off. |
Targeting Visitors
In Journeys, you may want to use session data to create conditions for your Chat Widget's Trigger, enhancing the visitor's experience and improving the internal tracking of your visitors. Let's explore how we can target sessions:
By Session Count
For this one, you can use the targeting property called “Number of Site Sessions”, where you can input any integer and conditions to evaluate the Journey Selection. For example, Number of Site Sessions >= 2.
When a visitor initiates a session, we will identify them either by ChiliData.Email (Email Data Field) or guestId, and whenever a visitor returns for a second or greater session, we will update their total session count.
We track the session count for all visitors.
By Known ChiliData.Email
Similar to the above, you can add one property that can be used to evaluate the Journey Selection.
This property checks our database to see if the visitor's ChiliData.Email (your Email Data Field) is known. Note that the number of sessions is not considered in this property. For example, you can add some extra evaluation to exclude public domains.
Click here if you would like to learn more about Data Fields.