Understanding sessions and events in Sitecore CDP
This is a useful topic to familiarize yourself with if you are marketer or business user and want an overview of how Sitecore CDP processes behavioral data.
Sitecore CDP can process a guest's behavioral data, such as when a guest clicked a button, viewed a webpage, or added an item to their cart. Each instance of behavioral data is an event.
Your organization can capture and asynchronously send events in real-time to Sitecore CDP using the Stream API. Sitecore CDP groups events together that occur on a specific channel during a set period of time. The process of grouping events into sessions is called sessionization and varies per channel.
Sitecore CDP uses the following attributes to categorize event sessions:
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Channel
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Point of sale
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Browser ID
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Timestamp
The following is the basic sessionization algorithm:
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Group events by channel and browser ID and order by time. This creates distinct groups of time-ordered events for each device and channel.
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Close the session after a certain period of inactivity. This is configured differently by each organization, for each tenant. For example, many organizations set 20 minutes as the amount of inactivity to close a session.