What are Google Analytics sessions and how are they measured?

What are sessions in Google Analytics?

A session in Google Analytics (GA) is a period of time in which a user interacts with your website.

When a user lands on your website for the first time, they start a session.

GA records the actions they take during this visit (called “hits”) as part of that session.

When the user leaves your site or is inactive for 30 minutes, the session ends.

Think of sessions as containers for all the actions and activities users perform while on your site.

GA sessions can be as long as several hours or more.

A session can contain multiple hits (eg page views, button clicks, events and transactions).

Or it may include only a single page view.

And a single user can record multiple sessions per day.

Sessions tell you how much time users spend on your site. As well as what they do on your website during that time.

Google Analytics Users Vs. Sessions

In Google Analytics, a user is an individual who visits your website and starts a session.

The user metric records how many individuals visit your site. The sessions metric records how many times those individuals visited your site.

A single user can record multiple sessions, but a session cannot have multiple users.

Because of this, GA will typically show more sessions than users. Like this:

Google Analytics Sessions vs. Page Views

A page view (or “view” in GA 4) is a single instance of a page on your website being loaded (or reloaded) by a user.

Typically, a user starts a session with a...