: Reasonable lifetime for a page view cookie I have a simple page view counter on my website, that just counts the number of page views pr post. I am curious to what is a reasonable lifetime

@BetL925

Analytics packages have a similar problem when counting sessions. If a user is on the site in the morning, then comes back that evening, is it one session or two?

Google analytics has a document about how they calculate sessions. They use a half our of inactivity as the threshold for starting a new session. Your two hour window is similar to this.

Since you do use Google Analytics, you might want to set your cookie to half an hour as well. Then the number of sessions that hit that page should be the same as page views that your hit counter reports.

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@Angie530

It really depends on your site and goals. There isnt a one size fits all approach. What I am wondering is why you are placing a cookie and ignoring future page views. Its pretty valuable information to see if a page is viewed multiple times. For example if you have an e-commerce site and notice that a visitor is viewing a product page 3 times on average before adding an item to cart, you can investigate and try to determine why it takes 3 page views. Maybe in that case you need to build urgency, or display information a bit clearer. My point is, dont throw away good information just because. If you are internally tracking visits, page views, events, collect all the data you can and then filter it out later.

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