Visitor
A visitor is a physical person who browses a website without being identified or logged in, as the Academy glossary defines it for Jahia. Such a person accesses published content. In digital marketing, visitors are the basic unit of an audience, the people you want to attract, inform and eventually convert.
Definition and how it works
The term visitor looks obvious, yet it covers different realities from one tool to another. Jahia’s definition clearly separates three groups that are easily confused. There are anonymous visitors of the public site, authenticated users (of a customer area or a web portal, for example) and the editors who run the site in Jahia.
The distinction matters for measurement as much as for personalization. In jExperience, a person’s activity is represented by a visitor profile (jExperience), fed by their sessions and by each recorded event (jExperience). A person and a profile are not the same thing. Depending on the identification rules in place, one person can appear under several profiles, for instance when switching devices.
Academy documentation: jExperience key concepts, including profiles
Related terms: Visitor Profile (jExperience) · Audience · Event (jExperience) · Web portal · Content management system
Resources that cover this term
- Website personalization: strategy, examples and best practices to boost conversions
- 4 steps to personalize your customers' web journey
- Conversion: 3 essential steps in your Personalization Strategy
- Enterprise CMS: Definition, Key Features and Benefits
- Headless CMS personalization: How to deliver truly adaptive experiences
- Headless Java CMS: In depth guide for developers
Visitor vs CMS user: the differences
A visitor is a person. An audience is a group of people. A profile is a record that represents someone’s activity in jExperience. The Academy glossary recommends avoiding the word "user", which is ambiguous, when talking about a site’s public.
| Concept | What distinguishes it |
|---|---|
| CMS user | A person with an account and permissions on the platform, such as an editor. No account is needed to read published content. |
| Audience | In the context of a website, everyone who browses it. An audience is then broken down into segments. |
| Visitor Profile (jExperience) | The record of a visitor’s properties and, depending on context, their sessions and events. It is not the person. |
Visitor in practice
A person discovers a company’s website as an anonymous visitor, downloads a guide, then later logs into the customer area. For the marketing team, this is one person. For the tools, it can mean an anonymous visitor, a jExperience profile enriched by a form and an authenticated account. Before comparing audience figures across tools, check that each one is counting the same thing.
Frequently asked questions
Does one visitor always equal one person in the statistics?
No. Tools count profiles, sessions or technical identifiers, not people. One person using two devices or clearing their cookies can be counted several times. Several people can also share a computer. Figures should therefore be read in light of the identification rules actually in place, with extra caution when comparing two tools.
Can the site be personalized for a visitor who has never identified themselves?
Yes, to a degree. jExperience associates an anonymous person’s activity with a profile, fed by the pages they view and the other events collected. That profile can fall into a behavior-based segment and receive tailored content, without the person ever giving their name. Any consent or opt-out mechanism still has to follow the rules that apply to your site.