What is the difference between the live sessions view and a profile timeline?
I see both a live sessions view and per-profile timelines in the dashboard and I cannot quite tell when to reach for which. They seem to overlap.
Can someone give me the mental model for what each one is actually for? I want to have it straight before I walk the team through it. thanks.
2 answers
The simplest way to hold it: live sessions is the real-time stream, the profile timeline is the stored history.
Live sessions shows you activity as it happens, visitors who are on the site right now. It is the view you keep open when you want to watch behaviour unfold. The profile timeline is the chronological record of one specific visitor's events after the fact, so you open it when you want to study a single person's journey.
Both draw on the same recorded events, which is why they feel like they overlap. One is just the live feed and the other is the saved history of the same stream.
The reason live matters at all is that Croct evaluates in real time, it acts while things are happening rather than only reporting on it later. So live sessions is you watching that happen, and the timeline is you reading back what happened for a given visitor.
Live stream versus saved history, that cleared it up. Thank you.