Connor BrookeWhen designing and developing a website, properly measuring a website’s ongoing performance is an important step to ensuring your marketing plans are giving you desired results. Since the introduction and roll out of the new Google Analytics Universal, account owners now see a dramatic change in possibly the most important metric you can pull. “Visits” are now “Sessions.”
What Is a Session?
A session is defined as a group of interactions one user takes within a given time frame on your website. Google Analytics defaults that time frame to 30 minutes. Meaning whatever a user does on your website (e.g. browses pages, downloads resources, purchases products) before they leave equals one session. In short, the Sessions metrics is a unified way to report “Visits” and “Active Users.”
What makes session reporting better than just “visits” is that you can accurately gauge if individuals are truly interacting with your website. Since a session times out, “passive” visitors won’t distort data. For example, visitors who keep your website open in a separate tab and continue browsing elsewhere won’t be counted past the 30 minute session marker.
Can I modify Session reporting?
Yes! As stated earlier, Sessions default to measuring 30-minute increments, but can be as little as one minute to as long as four hours. Google recommends thinking of the following when considering changing the time of a session:
- If your site logs a user out after a certain amount of inactivity
- If your site houses lengthy content that you anticipate the user spending time on
- If a campaign is expected to run for less than two years (this is specific to campaign timing, not individual sessions)
If your website meets any of the three points above, it’s wise to change your Session timeout handling to track user accurately. Otherwise, use your current average time spent on site as a baseline for what your timeout amount should be. For example, a website that receives an average visit duration of two minutes is certainly covered within the 30 minute amount, but could maybe afford to reduce it to 10 minutes.
Are there other modifications I should consider?
Yes, again! Within Universal Analytics, account holders can exclude specific referral traffic from Session reporting. The default reports any referral traffic as a new session, which the majority of the time is an accurate assumption. But, if you’re a B2B website that uses a third party web application, such as a scheduling provider or customer portal, excluding this URL in your Google Analytics will keep the entire visit within one session.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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Google Analytics does not define or default session length as (to) 30 minutes. It defines it as starting whenever the first page is viewed by the user and ending when 30 minutes of inactivity has occurred thereafter. So a session could last hours. (But not days–GA also considers any session over at midnight, even if 30 mins of inactivity has not occurred.) This definition means a session is *at least* 30 mins, which (of course) is totally different from being exactly 30 minutes.
Thanks for the additional information, Paul!
Very useful information. I use Analytics on my travel blog and I find the figures so accurate
Thanks for the comment. Glad you find it useful!
valuable information
Glad you found it helpful, Gaurav!
I’m still confused with sessions. What does it actually implies? Will you mind giving a example?
A session is when someone is on your website. For example, if I visit your website at 12pm, go to another website, and then come back to your site at 2pm, that would be two sessions. Does that help?
If I visit one website and immediately after loading the page I closed the tab and never come back to that page. Will it count as 1 session?
Yes, that should count as a single session. It would also count as a bounce, since you visited only one page and then left the site. Hope that helps!