# Impacted users

Measure the reach of your experience.

> **Automatically tracked**
>
> The SDK automatically tracks the events that feed this widget.

This widget shows the total number of active users who were impacted by your experience, along with their share of all active users in the workspace. It helps you understand the visibility and relevance of your experience within the broader context of your traffic.

You can also explore how that impact is distributed across different slots through a visual breakdown. This is especially useful when slots appear in different positions or pages, revealing which placements are driving more user engagement.

> **Question: What's the difference between sessions and active users?**
>
> - **Active user**: Any visitor, human or bot, who accesses your site at least once in the selected time period. We count each unique visitor only once within that period, no matter how many returns or page views. Anonymous and identified versions of the same person are counted as different users. That is by design to track unique identities, not guessed matches.
> - **Session**: A visit to your site. It can include multiple page views and interactions. It starts when a visitor arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity (by default). One active user can create multiple sessions in the same period.

## Metrics

![Impacted users widget](/assets/reference/analytics/experience/impacted-users.png)

The chart includes:

1. **Total impacted users**\
   The number of active users who were impacted by your experience.
2. **Share of total active users**\
   Out off all users that visited your application, how many saw your experience.
3. **Active users over time per slot**\
   A trend chart showing the percentage of impacted users per slot in the experience.

> **Question: What does the comparison over the last period mean?**
>
> It represents the growth or decline of the metric compared to the previous period.
>
> The *last period* refers to the date filter you selected. For example, if the filter is set to the **last 7 days**, the *last period* will be the **7 days immediately before that range**.

## Interpretation

Imagine your application had 60 active users in total. Now, let's say your experience appeared for 15 of those users. That means 15 active users were impacted, which is 25% of all active users.

We calculate this metric using the formula:

```math
Active \space users \space impact = \frac{total \space experience \space active \space users}{total \space workspace \space active \space users}
```

### What the number tells you

Here are some common insights you can get from this widget:

- A high percentage, such as 70%, indicates that your experience reaches the majority of your audience, roughly 7 out of 10 users encounter it when they visit your application.
- A low percentage, such as 5%, shows that only a small portion of users are exposed, about 1 in 20. This may happen if the experience appears only in narrow conditions or is placed where it's harder to notice.
- If the chart reveals that just 5% of impacted users saw the footer slot while 90% interacted with the main banner, it suggests that the banner has far greater visibility and influence, whereas the footer may not be a strategic placement.
- If, on the other hand, the distribution of impacted users is even across different slots, it means the experience is reaching visitors at multiple points in their journey.

## Explore

- [Events](/reference/event/overview#event-types): Learn how to track user events for analytics and personalization.
- [Audiences](/explanation/audience): Understand how to delivery content to specific groups of users.