The Visitors feed

The Visitors feed in Ana shows the people behind your traffic numbers: each visitor to your site, with a timeline of their sessions and what they did in them. Visitors start out anonymous; when one identifies themselves — by submitting a form, placing an order, or another identifying action — they become a contact in Reach, and their on-site behavior connects to their email address. The feed is where aggregate analytics turns into individual stories.

Like every Ana report, the feed is powered by the Zalify pixel — see Installing the Zalify pixel if it's empty.

Anonymous vs. identified visitors

Every visitor appears in the feed, but they come in two kinds:

• Anonymous visitors are recognized by the pixel across pages and sessions on the same browser and device, but Zalify doesn't know who they are. Most of your traffic is anonymous.
• Identified visitors have been matched to a real person — usually an email address. Once identified, the visitor is linked to a contact record in Reach.

The pixel keeps recognizing the same anonymous browser over time, so an anonymous visitor's timeline can span many sessions before you ever learn who they are.

How a visitor becomes a Reach contact

A visitor is identified the moment they do something that reveals who they are:

• Submitting a form or popup built in Zalify — the submitted email identifies them. See Connecting a form to a list.
• Placing an order — the order's customer details identify them. Order data arrives through your store connection; see Connecting Shopify.

When identification happens, a contact is created in Reach (or matched to an existing one), and the visitor's on-site behavior is tied to that contact. That link is what makes behavior-based marketing work: segments and automations in Reach can react to what a contact does on your site. See Managing contacts.

Reading a session timeline

Open a visitor in the feed to see their session timeline — each visit to your site, and the actions inside it.

1. Open the Visitors feed in Ana.
2. Select a visitor to open their profile.
3. Scan the sessions from most recent down. Within a session you'll see the pixel's automatically tracked activity — page views, product views, add-to-cart actions, and purchases.

Timelines answer questions aggregates can't:

• What does the path to purchase look like? Open a few recent buyers and count sessions and days from first visit to order. That tells you how long your real consideration window is — useful context for Attribution.
• Why didn't this cart convert? A visitor who added to cart and vanished shows you the last page they saw before leaving.
• What did this customer browse before writing in? When a known contact emails support about a product, their timeline shows what they were looking at.

Using the feed day to day

The feed is most useful as a qualitative habit rather than a report you monitor:

• After launching a campaign, open a handful of visitors it brought in and watch how they actually browse.
• When a form starts collecting signups, spot-check new identified visitors to confirm the identification is working end to end.
• When the Analytics Overview funnel shows a drop-off, open visitors who dropped at that step and look for the common pattern.

Troubleshooting

• The feed is empty. The pixel isn't firing — see Installing the Zalify pixel and the Pixel not tracking checklist.
• Nobody is ever identified. Check that your forms are published and submitting successfully (Viewing and exporting submissions), and that your store is connected so orders come through.
• The same person appears as multiple visitors. One person browsing on two devices or browsers is two anonymous visitors until they identify on each.