What is a session in Google Analytics?

It is the timeframe the user is active on a particular website interacting (“known as hits”) with the webpage. Example: whatever the user does on a website like browsing, reading, exploring, purchase, downloads…etc. be it anything that the user does is defined as a session time frame that the user is active before they leave the page or website.

Multiple sessions could be opened by a single user, all these could be continuous or at a random time interval of a week or a month or it could be on a same day. There are 2 different ways through with the session will end, they are :

Time out: After 30 minutes or at Midnight

Change of campaign: if the campaign changes & the user arrives through a new campaign

The above sessions would be explained bellow with examples to understand in detail :

Sometimes the user would just not do anything, a user might just open the landing page of the website & could continue browsing on some other tab. So Google by default set that time to 30 minutes. In short it’s a way to find out the number of visits and activity, active users on the website.

Active users will help the website to measure the website interactions with the user. Wherein the passive users won’t distort the data on the website.

Is an user continues to be on the webpage for more than 30 minutes he will still be counted as a same user but with an additional session count. If a user continues to visit the webpage again on the same browser or the same device the user will be marked as a repeat user & similarly the user would increase the session counts. If a user logs on to your website at around near midnight 11 : 59 and logs out around 12 : 01 that will be counted as a unique user / repeat user with two session.

You can rest the session timing based on the service you are offering. Example if you are offering a banking service the session timing will be much short compared to the webpage offering a long read journals.

Benefits of tracking sessions on Google analytics

It will help us know if the campaign is working or not.

It would help us understand the bounce rate without any activity during a session

It will help us know if the session counts no of unique visits or repeat visits

Similarly many more . . .

Thus session in Google analytics help us monitor & track various behaviour of a user in this digital marketing era of understanding & providing a better experience to the users.