With the Visitors activity, you can see a real-time list of all the visitors currently on your website. It helps summarize all visitor information at a glance, including information about their browser, operating system, location, pages visited, and referral page. This visitor information is only available for websites with the widget embedded. You cannot view a visitor's path on websites that do not have your widget added.
This article contains the following sections:
Monitoring your website visitors
The Visitors activity gives you a birds-eye view of all the visitors on your website. You can view the Visitors activity in the following ways:
- List view, which shows visitors in a list that is divided into categories.
- Visual view, which shows visitors in a heat-map style display.
List view | Visual view |
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Each visitor is placed into a category, represented by an icon (for the List view) or a color-coded dot (for the Visual view). The table below shows the icons, and the category each represents:
List icon/Visual color | Category name | Category description |
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Incoming chats | Visitors who have clicked the chat button and asked a question.Note: This only includes visitors that are in a currently signed-in agent's department. See Creating agents and departments. |
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Assigned | Visitors whose chats have been assigned to an agent. |
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Chat button clicked | Visitors who have clicked the chat button but have yet to start a chat. |
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Trigger activated | Visitors who have activated a trigger. Note: if a visitor is already in the Incoming chats category, activating a trigger will not put them in the Trigger activated category. The Incoming chats category takes precedence. |
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Currently served | Visitors who are being currently served by other agents or yourself. |
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Active website visitors | Visitors who are moving around the website and clicking on links. |
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Idle website visitors | Visitors who are currently on the site, but not interacting with it. |
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Offline visitors (Visual view only) | Visitors who have recently signed off. Reload the view to remove from the visual. |
In the List view, Each category includes a combination of the following columns, containing information about the visitor:
- Visitor: The visitor's ID.
- Online: How long the visitor has been on the website.
- Message: The most recent message left by the visitor in a chat.
- Viewing: The number of pages with the widget script the customer has visited during this session.
- Visits: How many times the visitor has been on the website in the past year.
- Chats: How many times the visitor has initiated a chat.
- Referrer: Referring URL.
- Served by: Chat agent currently serving the visitor.
Grouping visitors
This is the primary view of the Visitor List, but you can also monitor them in a number of different ways:
- Activity: This is the default page and breaks down visitors based on the actions they have taken on your website.
- Page Title: Groups visitors based on the page they are on.
- Page URL: Groups visitors based on the URL/link they are on. This is normally different from the Page Title.
- Country: Groups visitors based on the country they are from. The visitor's IP address tells us which country they are from.
- Serving Agent: Groups visitors based on the agent who is serving them.
- Department: Groups visitors based on department.
- Browser: Groups visitors based on the browser they are using to access your website.
- Search Engine: If the visitors arrived at your website through a search engine (e.g. Google), they will be grouped under this category.
- Search Term: If the visitors typed in a search term to get to your website, they will be grouped in this section based on the term they used.
Using the High-Load Dashboard
If you experience higher traffic (5000 or more concurrent visitors), you can switch to the High Load Dashboard.
Unlike the standard Visitor List, the High Load Dashboard only shows Incoming and Currently Served chats.
The High Load Dashboard is available to all customers on paid plans.
To enable the High Load Dashboard
- From the dashboard, go to Settings > Account > Visitor List tab.
- Select the High Load Dashboardcheck box.
- Click Save Changes.
- Return to the dashboard and verify that only Incoming and Currently served chats appear.
13 Comments
Curious why does the Zendesk visitors view show less visitors than google analytics? Is there something it's not counting?
Thanks!
Today ZenDesk is showing more than GA. What is the discrepancy?
Hi Meghan,
The difference in number is usually due to the timezones being different. Also, I have seen cases where visitors block GA and the events don't get sent but the chat gets recorded.
If you need more help troubleshooting the difference, please email chat@zendesk.com
-Ramin
I am logged into zendesk using the Admin account still i am not able to see list of user logged into the zendesk.
Please help.
Hi Tanya,
I'm wondering if you have these options on your Chat?
Monitor:
Team:
This also doesn't show for me either. I enabled Agent Workspace and it goes away. I disable agent workspace, i can see visitors again. I write into the support team they have no clue.
Hi, i use zendesk on my phone with the zendesk app, when a visitors joins my site i get a notification at the top of my phone, or 'homescreen when phone is locked' regarding a new site visitor..
However when I click on this notification it brings me to my zendesk app.. and it doesn't show the visitor in the visitor's list.. ( i tried this myself while i was still on my site ) so it couldn't be that the visitor has left that quick.. they ONLY show up when they initiate a chat with me first!
I'd like to see the visitor's and be able to send them a message before they sent me one!
Zendesk gave up on their chat product
it just doesn't make sense that my visitors do not show in list.. i DO get an push notification regarding new incoming visitors.. but they just do not show in the freaking list..
I was surprised to learn that when you set the visitor department already on the page side with javascript (Widget API) or even by trigger on Chat dashboard side, you still can't group visitors by department that have not requested a chat (or are served). The department seems to be visible on visitor list only after chat has started. Most of visitors appear under no department section, even if visitor department has been set. Is this really so - Is there any workaround this (other than tags), so that departments could efffective only see their own visitors, all of them, and proactively start chats with them?
@Jack, looks like this was a limitation with Agent Workspaces but you were able to resolve it after toggling that feature off. I know they are looking to make improvements with Agent Workspaces and the Visitor List falls under that list of improvements our PM's would like to address. Thanks for taking the time to share this with us!
@Arno, were you able to get this question answered at all? Otherwise, I'm happy to create a ticket on your behalf so we can dig into this further. Let me know!
While browsing Visitors by Page Title, we are seeing a large volume of users lumped under the heading "No Page Title". When expanded, it shows a variety of pages across our website, including the URL they are currently viewing. Is there a reason these are parsed out separately?
Hey Felicia,
The Page Title shown by the Chat dashboard's Visitor page would depend on the text declared within the <title></title> tags in your website's HTML. You may want to confirm with one of your developers to see if there's any issue with the title tags on your website.
I hope this points you in the right direction!
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