What’s the Difference Between Sessions and Users in Google Analytics?
Last year, Google changed the terminology that Analytics uses to reference visits to your website. Previously there were Visits and Unique Visits. Sounded pretty simple, right? If you look at a report today you’ll see Sessions and Users instead of Visits and Unique Visits. Even though this change was made months ago, I’ve spoken to some of our clients recently who are a little unsure of what the terms mean. In this post, I’ll keep it simple
Sessions
Session has effectively replaced Visits. It’s measured by interactions with a website, driven by a cookie set on a visitor’s browser when they arrive on the site. The default session expiration is set to 30 minutes, meaning if you’re like me and leave tabs open all day, the cookie will time out after 30 minutes. If I come back to the page and go anywhere else on the site, that will begin a new session.
Users
Users replaced Unique Visits. I can be 1 user but count for multiple sessions.
Simple question, simple answer. I’ll save a deeper look at defining Sessions in another post.