Heartbeats for more accurate visit duration tracking

[Kovah]

I consider switching from Shynet to Umami as Shynet doesn't get any updates and doesn't support events out of the box. but one thing I'm missing in Umami are heartbeats.

Once the Shynet tracker is loaded on a website, it sends heartbeats for the current session every x seconds. This allows for a pretty accurate session duration tracking even on single-page websites like my portfolio. Example: the user spends 45 seconds on the page, so a heart beat is sent 4 times, which results in a tracked session duration of 40 seconds in Shynet.

In Umami however, the bounce rate for my website is 100% and the session/visit duration 0s. This also applies to blog posts where people spent some time reading and then close the page. That's pretty unfortunate.

I would even contribute this feature, but I'm not sure if that would break the metrics processing in Umami.

What do you think?

[maxiride]

I am interested in the subject as well and while researching the topic I stumbled upon #3518, I guess it only helps to link the issue and the discussion to bring together the thread.

[Avataw]

100% my metrics are pretty meaningless without an accurate visit duration.

[malmaladei]

I noticed a lot of 0s sessions with my page. After diving deeper into the topic and clearing all bot traffic with Cloudflare, it seems to be related to the fact that I have a very high bounce rate and users who bounce and dont send a second signal simply get counted with a 0s session.

Before I had already implemented a custom engaged_10s event that was sent every 10s.

After learning about this I built myself a kind of heartbeat system by sending engaged_1s, 2s... through to 5s, then _10s, _20s, 30s, then backing off to 60s, _120s, 180s... etc.

This fills up my events now, but it should also help umami track more acurate session duration because each event has a timestamp itself that umami can use to calc session duration.

At least that's what I understood.

But yeah, internal heartbeat system would be much appreciated.