What do sessions mean

A user changes campaigns : for example, if someone arrives on your site through a Facebook campaign, leaves, then returns later through organic search, those will be classed as two different sessions. Google Analytics pageviews are the individual URLs that load when a user visits your site—regardless of their session. Because of that, one session can result in several pageviews.

Technically, the first case shows that people are viewing several pages in one visit, and the second that each individual person is returning back to your website for multiple sessions. But what does that actually mean? Why are people viewing several pages in one go? Why are they coming back a lot? To find that kind of answer, you need to collect additional context using a few complementary tools:.

Recordings do what the name says: record how people interact with your website pages, and give you a video of the exact journey someone goes through after landing on your site. What will you learn? Or, you might find that some pages push people away and reduce their pageviews per session. Can you edit your campaigns to stop pushing people there? Can you optimize the page and encourage them to continue their session? Conversion funnels show the typical route-to-goal for your customers, and you can specifically use them to see where sessions drop off—which helps you prioritize which pages with high drop-offs need optimizing.

If you are using Hotjar : start by identifying your main goal e. List all the pages and include them in the funnel you build:. Monitor how people drop off in their journey towards a conversion. Pro tip : in Hotjar, you can tie session recordings and the funnel together and watch sessions of people who leave at each specific step of the funnel.

Customer feedback is a goldmine of data for marketers—especially when investigating your Google Analytics sessions. You can use on-site surveys to ask people why they are leaving their session instead of guessing their decision:.

However, if that person visited 3 pages on your site in each of those sessions, while this would count as Pageviews the number of pages viewed on one website , it would still only be sessions. A new session in Google Analytics starts after 30 minutes of inactivity, or at midnight — so if a user opens your website, walks away from their computer for 45 minutes, and returns to the page after that, it counts as 2 sessions. The easiest way to remember the difference is to think of bacon.

This is going somewhere, we promise… Consider the user a person, the sessions the meals a person has in a day, and the pageviews the components of each of those meals. If you have eggs, bacon, coffee, and toast for breakfast, that correlation in Google Analytics is one user you , one session breakfast , and 4 pageviews eggs, coffee, toast, and — yes — bacon.

If you had a salad and iced tea for lunch, that would still be the same user, with a new session and two pageviews. Because this is a new meal session , even though you already had eggs and bacon once that day, they would still count as new pageviews because they occurred in dinner versus breakfast. And almost as tasty. But where do you find these metrics in Google Analytics? Click on the Audience Report, then click Overview.

Here, you can see a list of important metrics including Users, New Users, and Sessions. Although they appear in the same area and can often display similar numbers, you can see now what the differences are. 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.

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! The best of B2C in your inbox every Monday Sign up now. Toggle navigation Business 2 Community. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard Can I modify Session reporting?