Complete guide on sessions in Google Analytics

Complete guide on sessions in Google Analytics

It’s important to apprehend your customer’s behavior, particularly whilst going for walks a brand new website. The more you realize about your visitors’ interactions together along with your site, the higher you could healthily seek their purpose and earn extra visits. 

Most net directors use an internet analytics device like Google Analytics to track their website’s traffic. Google Analytics remains a famous device due to the fact it’s each unfastened and especially detailed, with masses of functionality to essential net metrics.

What are sessions 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.

If the same user visits your page in the morning and later again at night, that counts as two sessions. If they visit your website ten different times a week, it will count as ten different sessions.

In short, the same user can have multiple sessions in a single period, and each session can record multiple user interactions. User interactions include page views and transactions. 

How does Google Analytics track sessions?

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.

With cookies, Google Analytics can identify users’ interactions within a session if they are using the same browser and device. If a user visits one of your pages on another window with the same browser and device, Google Analytics will still count it as one session. 

To filter sessions, select Acquisition from the left-hand menu, then All Traffic. Google Analytics allows you to view the total number of sessions by channel, treemaps, source/medium, and referrals. Select Source/Medium to see your top traffic sources and how well each source performs. 

When will Google Analytics end a session? 

Each session has an expiry time and can end in three ways:

1. Time-based expiration: A session ends automatically when a user doesn’t make any interactions with the site within 30 minutes. Google resets the 30-minute countdown with each interaction.

2. End of day expiration: A session will automatically terminate at the end of the day and according to your time zone settings. If a user visits your site at 11:59 pm and leaves 5 minutes after, it’ll count as two sessions. 

3. Campaign-based expiration: A session will expire if a user returns to your website via a different campaign source. If someone arrives on your site through a Facebook campaign, leaves, then returns later through a Google Ads campaign, those count as two different sessions.

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.
• And Why some users don’t enter your sales funnel.
• Why do people leave your website without converting?
• If there is missing information that prospect needs 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 to find sessions in Google Analytics

To see how many sessions your site earned in a set period:

1. Open Google Analytics.
2. In the left-hand column of Google Analytics, select the Audience tab, then Overview.
3. In the Overview report, Google Analytics displays the total number of sessions per specified period.

By default, Google Analytics will give you data from the last seven days, so you’ll need to change the time frame using the feature at the top right of the page.

You can view data from the first day you set up the tool on your website to the current date. You can also compare the number of sessions year-over-year or within specific periods. 

How to change session timeout settings 

By default, sessions expire after 30 minutes of inactivity. However, you can change the time limit for your sessions. Sessions can be as short as one minute, or as long as four hours.

When selecting a new session length, consider your website and industry type. Google offers some suggestions to help you get started:

• If your site logs a user out after a certain amount of inactivity, Google Analytics recommends setting the session timeout to match that length of time.
• If your site contains a lot of content, you’ll expect users to take a long time engaging with that content. Considering increasing the session time.
• If your website has a small amount of content, consider shortening the session time.

If you decide to change the timeout settings, keep in mind that the modification will only affect future data. 

To change timeout settings:

1. Select the gear tool at the bottom left of the page. Open Admin.
2. Select the account and property you want to modify by using the dropdown menus: 
3. In the Property column, select Tracking Info, then Session Settings:

Under Timeout Handling, use the controls to set Session timeout. Select Apply:

What’s the difference between sessions and page views? 

A pageview occurs anytime a user’s browser accesses a page on your website. It represents the number of times users click a specific URL. However, a single session can record multiple page views that take place while a visitor is on your site. 

For example, when a user visits your website and clicks on two pages, Google records that two page views occurred in one session. If the same user revisits the website days later and browses two more pages, Google sees one new session and four total pageviews.

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.

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 pay-per-click (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.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Website Credibility – Users frequently visit websites they trust. To gain users trust and credibility, you should:

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

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.