Understanding sessions and events in Sitecore Personalize
This is a useful topic to familiarize yourself with if you are marketer or business user and want an overview of how Sitecore Personalize processes behavioral data.
Sitecore Personalize 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 Personalize using the Stream API. Sitecore Personalize 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.
You can then use session and event data in decisioning and conditions, although data retention and duration limits apply.
Sitecore Personalize 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.