A person who interacts with a website, application, platform, or digital product.
A basic analytics and experience-design concept used to understand individual behavior over time.
Short and sweet:
A person who interacts with a website, application, platform, or digital product.
A basic analytics and experience-design concept used to understand individual behavior over time.
See also: Session, Pageview, User Experience
In a marketing or product context, a user refers to anyone actively interacting with a website, app, or platform, distinct from a passive viewer who simply sees an ad or a static page. Tracking behavior at the user level, rather than by session or pageview alone, lets teams see patterns like repeat visits, feature adoption, and drop-off across an entire relationship rather than a single visit. This distinction matters because a spike in traffic doesn’t always mean a spike in real, engaged users.
Every time someone opens Instagram to scroll through their feed, they’re acting as a user of the platform, generating the taps, likes, and comments that fuel its engagement data.
A shopper browsing product pages on a Shopify store before adding anything to a cart is still counted this way, since analytics tools track that activity long before a purchase happens.
Even a support agent logging into Salesforce to update a customer record fits the definition, since the term applies to anyone engaging with a digital system, not just the people buying from it.
