Today, we talk about sessions in Google Analytics.
AUDIENCE: The audience reports help us understand trends about our website visitors. Our web browser tells a lot about us, so website owners know your location, Internet service provider and more.
But the problem is that these reports don’t change very often. Trends are often measured over the course of months, and not days.
SESSIONS: Activity that happens within a 30 minute session window on your site
A session is what the visitor does on the website within a predefined period of time. The default time period is set at a 30 minutes window.
During a session, the visitor may click on a few pages, play a video, or left without any interaction on the website.
A session is different than say a pageview, which is calculated once a page finishes loading. A session tracks a continuous visit during a set time frame.
The default time period is 30 minutes. But Google Analytics allows you to set it at any time period between 1 minute to 4 hours.
Beginner. You'll need the knowledge of what is a sessions in Google Analytics in order to understand other features within Google Analytics.
It is the basic building block of understanding and doing analytics on Google Analytics.
Adjust accordingly: You should change the time period of a session depending on the type of content and visitors of your website. The data would make more sense if the session period matches how long it typically takes a visitor to interact with your website.
For example, hour long videos/ podcast would typically need the same amount of time to complete the action. So, the session should be adjusted accordingly. Otherwise, the session will timeout before the completion of that action.
It's changes everything: It is quite straight forward to change the time period. However, changing the session period will have repercussion on other metrics, and subsequently the reports throughout the account.
Want to know more about the Periodic Table of Google Analytics? Visit here for more information.