Whether you are looking at statistics on your dashboard or setting up triggers for marketing campaigns it is important to understand sessions, unique Visits, how these differ, and how we use them.
As well as collecting information about your WiFi guests, Springo collects useful statistics to help you create targeted marketing campaigns and to produce a dashboard of your venue activity.
Some examples of the statistics that we log are, what time a user arrived at your venue, how much data they used while connected, which WiFi access point they were connected to, and what time they left your venue. We capture these statistics into sessions and group them into unique visits
What is a session?
A Session is the period of activity of a device being connected to a WiFi access point.
WiFi devices will often change which WiFi access point they are connected to in order to gain better signal strength, this is often referred to as roaming.
As a device disconnects from a WiFi access point it completes a session, as the device roams to a new access point it starts a new session, the process takes a few milliseconds and appears seamless to the user.
To give better WiFi coverage, a larger venue will have multiple WiFi access points. For venues like shopping centres, art galleries, or nightclubs where a user may be constantly moving, their WiFi device will regularly be roaming from one access point to another to maintain WiFi connectivity as they move through the venue, this creating multiple sessions.
You can see a user’s logged sessions when selecting their profile from the Contacts page. In the below screenshot you can see that this user has had 5 sessions during their visit.
What is a Unique Visit?
A Unique visit is a group of sessions.
We use unique visits on your dashboard, e.g. to display how many returning contacts you had last week, this ensures you see how many times your contacts visited the venue rather than how many times they roamed between access points.
Once a user disconnects from your WiFi for 6 hours, we class that as the end of their unique visit. If a client returns after this time has passed, it’s classed as another unique visit. This method ensures you are getting accurate information about your venue.
Top Tip
From your dashboard statistics just click the purple i icon to see how we worked these out for you.
