Why do my Facebook and Instagram ad replays show long periods of no activity?

This is almost always caused by Meta’s in-app browser, not by a bug in your tracking or anything wrong with your store. A smaller share of these replays are bot traffic — covered below as a secondary cause.

The most common cause: Meta’s in-app browser

When a shopper clicks one of your Facebook or Instagram ads from inside the Facebook or Instagram app, your store opens in Meta’s own in-app browser — not Safari, Chrome, or whatever browser the shopper normally uses.

Two quirks of that in-app browser produce the symptom:

1. Meta keeps your page alive in the background after the shopper dismisses or closes the browser. From the session recording’s perspective, the visit is still “active” — but the shopper has moved on.
2. Shoppers usually swipe back to scrolling their feed without explicitly closing your store. Your page sits suspended in the background for minutes at a time, generating empty recorded time.

The result is a recognisable pattern: a replay that shows the shopper genuinely browsing — clicking, scrolling, reading — for some period, then several minutes of complete stillness.

This is not a tracking bug, a broken session, or a fake visit. It’s a quirk of how Meta’s in-app browser handles pages. The active portion of the replay is a real shopper interaction.

The less common cause: bots

A smaller share of long-inactive replays come from automated bot traffic — crawlers, scrapers, or click-fraud bots hitting your store. Bots typically generate very short sessions, but occasionally produce longer ones with no human-like cursor movement, scrolling, or clicking.

If you’re seeing a lot of these and they don’t correlate with Meta ad campaigns, see Are my visitors bots? for how to identify and filter them.

A different problem: long replays from non-ad traffic

If your long, inactive replays are coming from regular browser traffic (not the Meta in-app browser), the most common cause isn’t Meta or bots — it’s shoppers leaving your tab open while comparison-shopping in other tabs. See Why do I have long replays with little to no shopper activity? for that case.

What to do about it

For Meta in-app browser sessions: nothing. The recording reflects a real shopper visit. The trailing inactivity isn’t useful but it isn’t misleading either — the active portion is what you want to watch.

To skip the dead time when viewing a replay, use the Skip inactive toggle in the player bar. See Why is the replayer fast forwarding or skipping parts of the replay? for details.