Visitstate

Visitstate is a term used in digital analytics and web development to denote the captured state of a user's ongoing visit to a service. It combines elements of session tracking, user journey mapping, and client-side routing to describe where a visitor has been, what they have done, and what they are likely to do next.

A visitstate object typically includes fields such as session_id, user_id (often anonymized), start_time, last_seen, duration, and a history or path list of visited views or pages. It may also record referrer, current_path or route, device_type, operating_system, browser, locale, and approximate geolocation. Optional metrics can include events, click counts, dwell times, and engagement scores.

The primary purpose of visitstate is to enable analytics, debugging, and personalization across navigation boundaries. In single-page applications, visitstate helps preserve context when rendering different components or routes without a full page reload, and supports session reconstruction after interruptions.

Storage and transport decisions affect privacy and performance. Visitstate can be kept in memory, stored in cookies, localStorage, or server-side session stores, and may be transmitted as part of API calls or route changes. Designers should consider data minimization, consent, and security for any personally identifiable information.

In practice, visitstate complements concepts such as sessions, user journeys, funnels, and footprints. It provides a concrete snapshot of a visit that can be analyzed for patterns, used to restore state after reloads, or fed into experiments and personalization rules.

See also: session, user journey, analytics, single-page application, funnel analysis.