Not taking advantage of monitoring tools: One of the most common mistakes businesses make is neglecting to regularly monitor website performance and analytics data. In another scenario lets suppose the first session hit happened at 15:00, here Google Analytics will set the session expiry at 15:30. How does Google Analytics calculate average session duration? What counts as a session. This can also result in an inflated number of sessions and a higher bounce rate, which may give you an inaccurate picture of user engagement. It ensures that Google Analytics only tracks a user's active sessiongiving you clear insight into their behavior. Is not listing papers published in predatory journals considered dishonest? For instance, if a user spends 15 minutes on your website and then leaves for an hour before returning, their two visits will be recorded as two separate sessions. With tools like Dataflo, businesses can monitor and visualize their website's analytics in real time and receive alerts about website performance, allowing businesses to detect and resolve any issues quickly. The user visited the website and the first interaction (pageview 1) happened at 15:00, where Google Analytics has set the session expiry at 15:30, The next hit was again a pageview 2 happened at 15:02, where Google Analytics has reset the session expiry at 15:32, The third hit was an event that happened at 15:10, where Google Analytics has reset the session expiry at 15:40, The fourth hit was again an event that happened at 15:15, where Google Analytics has reset the session expiry at 15:45, The final hit was a pageview that happened at 15:20, where Google Analytics has reset the session expiry at 15:50, Over 15 years of experience in digital analytics and marketing, Author of four best-selling books on digital analytics and conversion optimization, Nominated for Digital Analytics Association Awards for Excellence, Runs one of the most popular blogs in the world on digital analytics, Consultant to countless small and big businesses over the decade. Maybe your website is over-generating events. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience. It is a group of hits recorded for a user in a given time period. In Google Analytics 4, default session timeout is also 30 minutes. Average session duration in Google Analytics Website analytics and user behavior insights FAQs about average session duration in Google Analytics What does average session duration mean in Google Analytics? The campaign source could be: search engines, referring websites, URLs with campaign parameters. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to campaign timeouts. A page load or an event trigger is known as a hit. Engagement rate = Number of engaged sessions / Total number of sessions over a specified time period. Beyond that default, session timeout can be adjusted to up to 7 hours and 55 minutes. This means that if a user is browsing your website until 11:59:59 pm and continues to engage with your website after midnight using Universal Analytics, a new session will start for the same user at 12:00 am. Monitor session duration data: After setting your session timeout duration, regularly monitor data to ensure the setting is accurate. You can see the Average Session duration for the entire website in the Audience Overview report: The rule of thumb is that before you read and draw conclusions from the average session duration metric, segment it to is most granular level and then look at the distribution of session durations. Setting the Session Timeout Duration Too Short: A session timeout that is set too short will result in a high number of sessions and low engagement time, which can lead to inaccurate data analysis. If the user comes back after 30 minutes of inactivity, a new session will begin. Maybe your website is over-generating events. they bounced off the site) their session duration is reported as 0, even if they spent time on the site. Generalise a logarithmic integral related to Zeta function. Why would God condemn all and only those that don't believe in God? Setting session timeout in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can be confusing, especially if you're new to this platform. Consider the following custom report of Google Analytics which shows number of GA sessions and average session duration for Direct Traffic: Now I will show you, how Google Analytics calculated the Average Session Duration for direct traffic. If you want to have an idea about how long an average session on your site is, go to your audience tab, click overview and youll see a summary with a couple of statistics like Avg. A web browser communicates with a web server by sending an HTTP request for each requested resource. Do the subject and object have to agree in number? session Thanks for contributing an answer to Stack Overflow! Session Duration: In Google Analytics, a session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. Let's take a look at the same supermarket analogy again. Data Are sessions and visits the same? Whereas, a Google Analytics session is a group of hits recorded for a user in a given time period. How many times did the session contain checkout activities? To choose the right session timeout duration, consider the following factors: User Behavior: Analyze the user behavior on your website to determine the average engagement time. Tracking sessions in Google Analytics help you discover and evaluate your user behavior and website performance, which eventually helps you understand your marketing efforts. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. How has the explosion of rival streaming services affected the TV audience landscape? You can make a session expire after 3 minutes of users inactivity or after 3 hours of users inactivity. We can also conclude that the majority of GA sessions triggered by direct traffic have a session duration of 0 seconds. Maybe your website is over-generating events. You can test it yourself by going to the real-time reports of Google Analytics (make sure you do this in a raw data profile so that your IP isnt blocked). The interactions can include pageviews, events, and e-commerce transactions. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. If a user visits your website via paid search ad the first time but later (say after 15 minutes) return to your website, by again clicking on the same paid search ad and Google Ads auto-tagging is enabled then the return visit will end the existing GA session and trigger a new GA session as the campaign source has changed. You can count their return as one session if they return within the set period. Now let us see, how Google Analytics calculated the Average Session Duration metric of 1 minute 40 seconds as reported below: Lets download this report into a Google Spreadsheet for the purpose of calculating the average session duration metric manually: Total duration of all GA sessions triggered by direct traffic = 3193 seconds, Total number of GA sessions triggered by direct traffic = 32, Average Session Duration for Direct Traffic =, Total duration of all GA sessions triggered by direct traffic / Total number of GA sessions triggered by direct traffic. When a user performs a new activity on a site following 30-minutes of Identify revenue sources, reduce churn and increase retention quickly. Session 18th November 2022 Lets talk about sessions and what role they play in Google Analytics 4. close the browser), Google Analytics will record the length of the session as 5 minutes. You can deep dive and stay on top of all Google Analytics metrics in one place on our MetricBase page. example, if Visitor A visits your site for the first time in January, You can do that by using the sessionControl configuration parameter while sending a hit. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. Google Analytics Sessions When setting the session timeout in Google Analytics, be sure to pay attention to the default value and how it works. What counts as a session. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. WebThe minimum session timeout in Universal Analytics is 1 minute, and the maximum is 4 hours, while in GA4, the minimum is 5 minutes, and the maximum is 7 hours and 55 minutes.The default session timeout for both GA4 and Universal Analytics is 30 minutes. Now that you have a better understanding of what a session is and how it's timed out, it's crucial to understand how sessions are tracked in Google Analytics. The default campaign session timeout in Universal Analytics is 6 months. Discover ways to make the CS team a successful third wheel in the GTM OS. You can call a session a container that contains multiple hits for a given time period. Here, the sessionControl configuration parameter is used to control the duration of a session. A session in Google Analytics begins when a user lands on your website and ends after a period of inactivity. Open it and immediately move to your Google Analytics tab. 10:05 AM. Website Type: Different types of websites have different user behaviors. All Google Analytics sessions have got an expiry date and they cant last longer than 4 hours. Note: An existing GA session will automatically expire if a user deletes the Google Analytics cookies. Attribution modelling is the process of determining the most effective marketing channels for investment. It impacts the accuracy of the data collected, the user experience, and the analysis of user behavior. The amount of time spent on the total site (Session Duration) is Time at last session hit (10:10) Time at first session hit (10:00), which is 10 minutes total. Bounce rate is a vanity metric that most of the time does not reflect the true user behavior. To calculate the correct average, we need to find and remove the outlier. But any way you come up with to expire sessions and get more events is likely to violate the ToS. Google Analytics Get this 70 page detailed checklist containing screenshots, step-by-step instructions and links to articles. If you are unwilling to accept things for what they appear to be in Google Analytics, you might want to know what else you can do. In the property settings, click on "Tracking Info" and then "Campaign Settings.". By clicking Accept all cookies, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy. An existing GA session will automatically expire if a user deletes the Google Analytics cookies. By default, a GA session expires, if no new hit is sent to the GA server within 30 minutes from the time when the last hit was sent. Well, it depends on how the Google Analytics code is triggered. session Personally, I don't think the 500 requests per session limit should be reached. By default, a session lasts until there's 30 minutes of inactivity, but you can adjust this limit so a session lasts from a few seconds to several hours. To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers. If your client or boss wants to argue over Time on Page or Session Duration figures, it may be good to educate them and explain that Google serves these figures. Sessions in Google Analytics GA4's design emphasizes privacy and data security. A GA session timeout can not be less than 1 minute or greater than 4 hours. Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". While both GA4 and UA provide insights into your website's traffic and user behaviorthere are some differences between these two products that we'll explore below! Conclusions from title-drafting and question-content assistance experiments Google Analytics Timeout (kind of) when Opening New Windows. A hit is a users interaction (pageview, screen view, event, transaction, etc) with your website that results in data being sent to the Google Analytics server. no. Basically, Google Analytics keeps track of every time a user visits your website. This happened because Google Analytics assigns session count only to the first hit in a session. Session Duration in Google Analytics Site design / logo 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. A good way to improve time on page and session duration (this also changes how bounce rate is calculated) is to put event tracking plan in place to measure interaction with a page such as: Have you ever opened a website and just left it sitting open in the background when you get on with other things and look at other websites?