The Sitecore Marketing Automation engine comes with a few powerfull listeners. My favorite one is the Custom Listener, which allows me to do almost anything. But there are some situation where the Visit Listener, an out of the box listener, will do the job. According to the Sitecore Documentation this listener does the following:
“Use the Visit listener to evaluate if the contact that reaches this element in the automation campaign has visited your website. The contacts that have visited the website move along the Yes path.”
So if you want to check if the visitor has done anything on your site during a specified period you can use this listener. But when will you use something like this?
Consider a nurture or churn flow where you have send an email to your customers and want to check if they have done anything on your site. Using other listeners is almost impossible if you have multiple goals, events, pages and so on. Then you can include the Visit Listener to check any interaction on your website. If no interaction occured during the specified period you can follow up with an email or something else. An example of a simple automation flow can look like follow:
In my experience, users that are new to Sitecore Marketing Automation, do not immediately understand what this listener does. So I hope this will explain in which situations you can use this listener and create powerful flows.