Skip to main content

Sessions FAQ

  • Updated

If you have question about Noibu's session capture or session search that isn't addressed here, contact Noibu Support for assistance.

How do Noibu and Google Analytics collect session data differently?

In Google Analytics, a single user can open multiple sessions. Those sessions can occur on the same day or over several days, weeks, or months. As soon as one session ends, a user can start a new session. Sessions expire by one of two methods:

  • Time-based expiration: A user's session expires after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight.
  • Campaign change: If a user arrives via one campaign–like social media, ad, search engine, etc.–and then leaves, if they return through another campaign it's counted as a new session.

Noibu operates similarly to Google Analytics, aside from two major differences:

  • Sessions tracked through Noibu do not expire at midnight. This ensures we track session dropoff during checkout accurately.
  • Noibu blocks certain IPs that are flagged as bots.

How long does Noibu store session videos?

Noibu stores session videos for 90 days, after which the sessions are deleted from our databases. This helps the Noibu platform run smoothly and prevents a backlog of session data from piling up and obscuring your search results. We believe 90 days in ample time for your developers to find and resolve an error.

However, you can save a session video indefinitely by Pinning the Session. A pinned session will be available until it's unpinned.

Why are some session videos shorter than the timeline?

A session video may be cut short for one of many reasons:

  • The user stopped interacting with the webpage.
  • The video file became too large to show in its whole.
  • An error on the Noibu side stopped the video recording.

If a user stops interacting with the webpage, the timeline may be longer than the video session timing.

Does Noibu's session capture ever fail?

Noibu captures session data on your eCommerce site through the NoibuJS Script, which is a simple line of code deployed to your website's HTML <head>, or through a tag manager. However, some plugins and web technologies block the Noibu script, including:

  • Aggressive ad blockers on your customer's browsers
  • Web browsers with auto-blocking, like Brave
  • Anything that remove our script from the HTML

To learn more about how Noibu captures sessions, watch the video below:

Can you find a user session via the Sessions index without an IP address?

If a proactive customer submits a support ticket or calls in, you can use Noibu to review their session and diagnose the problem. You can find the customer's session quickly by filtering the Sessions table by the user's IP address. However, if you don't have the customer's IP address, you can filter the table by other data points to find the session. Try filtering sessions by one or more of the following data points:

  • The date and time of the customer's session
  • The customer's browser
  • The customer's operating system
  • The URL of the page on which the user encountered the error.

Learn more about How to Track Down a Session and How to Find User Impacting Session Videos.

Alternatively, use the Help Code feature to associate a customer complaint to a session recording in Noibu.

Can we opt out of Noibu session tracking?

Noibu's goal is to find errors impacting your website and help fix those errors so your customers have a better experience and you avoid revenue loss. We take user privacy seriously, and tracking personal data is not one of our goals. We take many steps to ensure that people can't be tracked, including ensuring that session IDs are reset to a random number every 4 hours. Additionally, identifying information like IP addresses are never stored in our databases.

One of the ways we help you understand errors is through session videos. When recording a session video, we take steps to block out most user-identifying information. However, if you'd prefer to not have video sessions tracked, you can disable session tracking by going to your browser's settings and enabling Do Not Track. This ensures Noibu does not upload any video data to our servers.

Articles in this section