User management¶
When someone visits the website, Harvest Collect creates a cookie to identify the user. You could therefore say that a user is the same as a browser.
This means that if a person visits the website on a tablet and then on a desktop, that by default Harvest detects them as two different users.
It is possible to stitch these users together based on a person identifier. For more information you could read the user stitching documentation.
How does it work?¶
- An event is triggered by the user. This could be a pageview or any other type of event.
- Harvest Collect receives the event and processes the event.
- During processing, Harvest Collect checks for the harvest_user cookie.
4a. When the user is new, and therefore has no harvest_user cookie, Harvest Collect will create a unique ID. The userID. 5a. Harvest Collect saves this userID, together with some other meta data, to the harvest_user cookie.
4b. When the user not new, Harvest collect detects the harvest_user cookie and knows the user already existed. 5b. Harvest Collect saves the harvest_user cookie again to reset the timeout of the cookie.
A new user will be created when there is no cookie present. This will happen in the following situations:
- The user has never visited the website.
- The user deleted it’s cookies.
- The harvest_user cookie timed out. This happens after 730 days (2 years).
Cross domain
The cookie is first party. This means that it is domain specific. So if you have multiple domains, a unique userID is created for each domain. This means that the user is counted multiple times.
If you want to make link several userIDs on one browser. You could use cross domain tracking.
Sessions
An important other aspect of tracking is that a user returns to the website on different times. Tese different visits are called sessions.
More information about session can be found in the session management documentation.
