What is a Session in Google Analytics: How to Measure Your Website Performance

One of the most significant metrics to analyze your website performance is “session in Google Analytics.”

When setting up a website, it is essential to prepare analysis methods to be able to measure your marketing efforts and website growth. Google Analytics is one of the best tools for analyzing and evaluating your web data.

Sessions in Google Analytics tell you everything you need to know when a visitor lands on and interacts with your website. Understanding what sessions are and how they work for website analysis can be somewhat unclear. Grab a seat because you’re about to know everything about Google Analytics sessions.

What is a Session in Google Analytics?

A session in Google Analytics is a group of interactions recorded when a user visits your website within a given period. Google Analytics session begins when a user visits a page on your site and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or when the user leaves.

Whatever activities a user performs in the time of a website visit is counted as a single session. If the same user re-visits your website a few days later, that becomes another session. It is possible that a user may check your website seven different times in a week, which amounts to seven sessions.

The timer stops counting after 30 minutes of inactivity to prevent false average session duration data. Sometimes, you can leave a website page open on your computer for a whole week without spending more than some minutes per day. Rather than record the seven-day long session, Google Analytics counts the time you engage with the website.

A session can expire; hence, a single user can have multiple sessions on the same day, different days, weeks, or months. Sessions are actions taken within a particular time interval. They give you insights into how well your website is performing.

How does a Google Analytics Session work?

Cookies allow Google Analytics to identify users and their activities for a session using the same browser and device. Although, when a user browses one of your pages on another window, Google Analytics will still record a single session because opening a direct link in another window does not count as a new session.

What is a Good Session Benchmark?

You need to study what happens on your website to determine a good or bad session duration. The user behavior analytics is more important than the average session duration metric in this regard.

By paying close attention to user behavior analytics, you may be able to determine key insights, such as:

• Why some users move through the sales funnel quickly in comparison to others.
• Why some users don’t enter your sales funnel.
• Why people leave your website without converting.
• If there is missing information that prospect need to see on your website to move forward in the funnel.
• If there is anything that will cause friction in your funnel, which may prevent prospects from completing a conversion on your site.

How Long does a Session Last?

A session has an expiry time and can end in two ways:

1. Time-based expiration
2. Campaign-based expiration

i. Time-based expiration – Automatically, a session ends after 30 minutes have gone by without a user performing any activity. If user A visits your website, a session starts counting from the time of his arrival and stops when he doesn’t do anything on the site after 30 minutes.

However, if user A continues to interact with your site, Google Analytics resets the expiration time by adding 30 minutes from the time of the new activity.

For example, let’s imagine user A engages with your site at these intervals below,

The first session expires at 12:31, but as he continues to perform activities – like clicking on a call-to-action (CTA), navigating to your contact page, or making an e-commerce transaction – User A session will be reset.

What happens when user A leaves my website page open and returns from his lunch break in a little over 30 minutes to continue?

When user A returns to your website, he begins a new session, and Google Analytics sets him a new expiry time. This is because the first session already expired when the user left the page open without taking any action.

If user A wants to make a purchase and reaches the products page before going for lunch for 31 minutes, he begins a new session when he returns and continues from the add-to-cart page.

What if user A opens a page on my website and takes a 29-minute lunch break before he continues browsing?

Then user A continues with the session that was counting before he left. As far as Google Analytics is concerned, if it’s not up to 30 minutes, he never left your site.

What if user A Leaves at Midnight?

Let’s say user A visits your website at 11:50 PM and leaves at 12:10 AM, and used two sessions. The first session ended at 11:59 PM, and a new one began at midnight. It doesn’t rely on the 30-minute inactivity rule. It starts a new session to mark the end of a day and the beginning of a new one. Your time zone settings determine whether the day has ended or not.

ii. Campaign-based expiration – Each time the campaign source of a user changes, Google Analytics begins a new session. Let’s assume User A opens your site in this order:

Google Analytics saves the source data of campaigns, both paid and organic. Whenever the campaign value differs, Analytics opens a new session. For instance, if user A lands on your website the first time through an organic keyword “blue jeans,” that is a session.

If user A arrives at your site again through a paid keyword “jeans for men,” that is another session. Each campaign source means new sessions.

How do you track Google Analytics sessions (and why)?

Evaluating your website sessions makes you know what’s working in your search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC marketing efforts. It is also important to analyze User Behavior Analytics (UBA) to be able to track and use Google sessions properly.

For eCommerce websites, the Shopping Behavior Analysis report allows you to monitor your shop activities. You can use this report to discover if:

• A product was viewed
• There was an ‘add to cart’ event
• A successful transaction took place
• There was a checkout

To access this report in Google Analytics, click Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior:

The picture above shows that people exit their session when they don’t add products to cart. This insight tells the owner to find ways to make website visitors add to their carts. For instance, you could optimize internal linking and add recommendation bars.

What is the Average Duration of Google Analytics Sessions?

Average session duration is the average amount of time users spend on your site. To check the average session duration for your website in Google Analytics, click Audience > Overview.

The number of sessions per user is measured depending on whether the last page comprises engagement hits.

No engagement hits:

When there are no engagement hits on the last page, the duration is calculated as:

Time of the first hit on the last page – time of the first hit on the first page

For example:

Page 1: first hit: 11:10 AM

Page 2: first hit: 11:20 AM

Page 3: first hit: 11:30 AM

11:30 minus 11:10 = a session duration of 20 minutes (1,200 seconds)

Engagement hits:

When there are engagement hits on the last page, the duration is calculated as:

The time of the last engagement hit on the last page – the first hit on the first page

For example:

Page 1: first hit: 11:00 AM

Page 2: first hit: 11:05 AM

Page 3: first hit 11:10 AM; last engagement hit: 11:15 AM

11:15 minus 11:00 = a session duration of 15 minutes (900 seconds).

Average session duration in Google Analytics is calculated as the total amount of time of all sessions during a given period divided by the total number of sessions during that same time.

For example, if three visitors arrive at your website:

• Visitor #1 spent 100 seconds on your site.
• Visitor #2 spent 60 seconds on your site.
• Visitor #3 spent 260 seconds on your site.

Google Analytics would sum up the duration of these sessions (100+60+260) and divide the sum (420) by the number of sessions (3) to calculate your average session duration of 140 seconds, or 2 minutes and 33 seconds. Sometimes, Analytics shows this as 00:02:33.

What Differentiates Users and Sessions in Google Analytics?

Sessions refer to the number of sessions spent by users on your website, while users refer to the number of visitors that landed on your website. Google used to refer to users as unique visitors but stopped because not all website visits are unique (That is, it’s not always a new user per web visit).

For example, if you use two devices to browse a website, it will record this as two unique visitors. This is why it’s now referred to as ‘users.’

Here’s a simple analysis:

• Google Analytics cookie is set to uniquely identify a user who lands on your website for the first time.
• The moment a user leaves your website after this time that makes the end of the first session.
• If this user returns to your website the same day, using another browser, Analytics will know the person is a returning user.
• After spending minutes on your website, if the user exits again, that marks another completed session.
• This means the user has completed two sessions.

In summary, a single user can have multiple sessions. Since you can’t have more users than sessions, the number of sessions used will always be higher.

What is the Difference Between a Google Analytics Session and Pageview?

Pageviews are the number of times users click a single URL. This means you can have multiple pageviews in a single session.

For instance:

• If a user arrives at your site and views seven pages before exiting, that’ll be seven page views in one session.
• If the person returns to check out three more pages, that’ll be another session and ten pageviews for that user.

What is the Difference Between a Session and a Unique Pageview in Google Analytics?

If a user visits multiple pages on your website before leaving, they are counted as pageviews that made a session. However, when the user reloads a page or presses the back button to revisit the previous page, it’s still recorded as a pageview, but not a unique one.

A unique pageview is counted when a user lands on a particular page in a single session. If the person comes back to your site and revisits a page, it will be counted as a unique pageview because it’s a new session. Having pageviews more than unique pageviews is mostly a good thing. It means your page is a reference/ go-to resource.

How Can You Modify Google Analytics Session Reporting?

Google Analytics Sessions end after 30 minutes of a user’s inactivity, and campaign reporting stops after six months. You can change the session and campaign settings so that they end after a given period. The session and campaign timeout reporting depends on your website and goals.

Before modifying session and campaign timeouts, here are a few things to note:

• If your website automatically signs any user out after inactivity, set the session timeout as that length of time.
• If you have a huge content library that takes long engagement time, lengthen the session timeout, and vice versa.
• Set the campaign timeout to the exact time the campaign will run.

To change the session setting,

• Log in to your Google Analytics account.
• Click Admin
  
• Click Tracking info from the Property column. Then, select Session settings from the drop-down.
  
• You will be able to adjust the session or campaign timeout settings. Afterward, click done.
  

How Can You Increase Your Average Session Duration?

Is your average session duration too low? You can increase it by keeping visitors on your site longer with the following tips.

• Interactive Website Design – An interactive design is simple, attractive, and straight to the point. No matter how great your website content is, if your design is poor or complicated, visitors will bounce. Use a user-friendly theme, super-readable font and size, attractive colors, and high-quality graphics.
• Readability Of Web Pages – Your website copy should be scannable and readable. The content layout, navigation, ads placements, bullets, blog post formatting, and grammar should be easy, clear, and straightforward. Also, add whitespaces, walls of texts are unreadable.
• High-Engagement Pages – Normally, your website’s homepage gets the most visits. So, optimize it for engagement and conversion. However, there can be a few more pages that get high engagements. Focus on making them better for new and returning visitors by updating with useful content, interlink to other website pages, display relevant ads, etc.
  
  
• Relevant Images – To increase users’ session duration on your site, add unique, relevant, high-quality, and small-size images. People are interested in content with visuals. Use attention-grabbing images to convey your message in a way it will resonate with your audience. Use proper image sizes and alt texts.
• High-Quality Content – After your audience has decided to stay awhile, your content is what will determine if they’ll stay longer. Create high-quality content that resonates with your audience and provides solutions to their problems.  Your content should be original, informative, engaging, actionable, and correct. Include relevant images that support your claim.
• Informative Videos – Users are interested in seeing videos even more than images or text. Adding videos to your website can increase conversion by 4%. Generally, relevant videos can improve your website engagement.
• Buyer’s Journey – It is necessary to know, understand, and tend to the different stages in a buyer’s journey. Create a buyer’s personas and map out your buyer’s journey. This will help you produce tailored content that fits the three stages (awareness, consideration, and decision) of the buyer’s journey.
• Internal Linking – Internal linking is not only good for improving average session duration but SEO as well. Linking relevant keywords to link to other related pages on your site where users can find relevant information around a specific topic keeps them on your site longer.
• Content Update – Content can get outdated with time. This is why it is necessary to update old posts with new info relevant to a visitor. No matter how ‘evergreen’ a piece of information is, there’s always updates to make it fresher.
• Calls-To-Action And Comments – At the end of your content – videos or blog posts, you should prompt your audience to take action to increase your website engagement. This means adding a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your content. It can be to answer a question, ask any, share your post, leave their thoughts, etc.
• Website Credibility – Users frequently visit websites they trust. To gain users trust and credibility, you should:

1. 1. 1.  You should post great content regularly.
      2. Guest post on a higher authority website.
      3.  Collaborate with other websites in your niche.
      4. Add certifications, awards, and mentions
      5. Include customer testimonials.

FAQs:

1. Sessions and Visits – Are They the Same?

Google Analytics ‘sessions’ used to be called ‘visits’ some years ago. Now, a visit means a pageview or page tracking hit recorded when a user loads or reloads a webpage. There can be multiple visits in a single session. If a user clicks four pages on your website before leaving, that makes four visits in one session.

2. Does Scrolling Count in Google Analytics Sessions?

Google Analytics does not track page scrolling.  Sessions are not extended when a user scrolls.

3. Are Website Visitors in Google Analytics Unique?

Not all of them. Google no longer uses the term “unique visitors. Because a user can be counted as your website visitor multiple times depending on the devices used, location changes, redirection sources, etc.

4. What is the Difference Between Average Session Duration and Time on Page?

In Google Analytics, ‘average session duration’ is a metric that analyzes the average amount of time users spend on your website. In contrast, ‘time on page’ measures the average amount of time users spend on a single page on your site.

5. How Many Minutes is Session Timeout in Google Analytics?

By default, sessions in Google Analytics expire after 30 minutes of a user’s inactivity.

Wrap Up

Google Analytics makes it easy to evaluate your marketing strategy and website progress. It analyzes activities like your users’ behavior, channels your audience comes from, and responses to your site’s content.

Session in Google Analytics gives you insight on how long a user interacts with your website. When you understand it, you know how long users interact with your website on average, what you can do to increase your average website session, and if your content is relevant or not. Moreover, your site’s session and campaign timeouts can be adjusted depending on your website and marketing goals.