People and retention

Seean’s default visitor identity changes every UTC day, so anonymous visitors cannot be followed from one day to the next. People and Retention work on users your own site identifies instead.

Turn on identify

1. Open Settings → Installation → Dashboard and switch Identify users on, then Save tracking options. While it is off, the collector drops any user id the tracker sends.
2. After a user signs in to your site, call the tracker with your own user identifier:

window.seean?.identify("user_42", { plan: "pro" });

The id is 1–64 characters from A–Z a–z 0–9 _ . : @ -. Send your internal user id, never an e-mail address or a name. The optional properties follow the custom event property limits and are recorded on an identify event. The id stays in memory for the open page only; nothing is written to browser storage. Every later pageview, event and Web Vitals record from that page carries the id. Calling identify on each page load records one identify event per load, which counts as one event of your plan.

People

People lists the users identified in the selected period, most recently active first (up to 200 rows; the header shows the full count): user id, last and first activity, sessions, events, and the last country and browser. Open a row for that person’s timeline: the activity log narrowed to one user, where identify rows show their properties. Show everyone returns to the full log, All people to the list.

People and Retention are available to website owners and admins. Viewers, the public demo, share links, embedded widgets and the analytics API never include identified users.

Delete a person

The website owner can choose Delete this person in a timeline. Every event record of that user id on the website is removed through the same bounded deletion used by statistics reset; cached analyses are recomputed. Deleting a person does not stop collection: if your site identifies the same id again, the person reappears. Statistics reset and website deletion also remove identified records. User ids are included in the events CSV export of owners and admins.

Retention

Retention groups identified users into weekly cohorts by the week they were first seen on the website (ISO weeks, Monday to Sunday, in your display time zone). Week 0 is the cohort week and every later column shows the share of the cohort active that many weeks later, shaded by the share; a dot marks weeks not yet reached. Cohorts start inside the selected period; the first-seen week looks back over the whole retained history, so a user who returns after a long pause is not counted as new. Anonymous visitors are never part of retention because their daily hash cannot be linked across days.

Privacy

An identified user id is personal data under your control. Seean stores it only for websites that enabled identify, only as a column on that website’s event records, for the same three-year retention, and never derives it itself. Document the processing in your privacy notice and see the technical privacy guide and the data processing agreement.

Something unclear? Contact support.