Can someone explain in clear terms what Sessions are. Is it just an action (click) made within your site? and if so, is that one click per visitor?

 

Also what has happened to visits? I can see the number of users, but how do I see the exact figure for the number of times my site gets a visit?

Edited May 20, 201412 yr by neil0wen

Session is the new visit, all actions.

 

I believe they've renamed it because the old "unique visit" metric an entirely accurate term, it didn't (couldn't) account for cookie-less and multi-platform visits.

 

Essentially a session is a visit with one or more interactions... it's still a visitor, just hard to describe it as unique.

Here's a more descriptive answer: https://plus.google.com/+GoogleAnalytics/posts/LCLgkyCn4Zi

I see, does it record an action from say a link to another website or a javascript funtion, or does it require those events to have the standard code applied to it before it can count those as an action?

 

So as far as I can tell a 'User' is a unique visitor to the site and a 'Session' is a unique visit to the site (eg, it could be the same visitor if they leave the site and return again (recorded by only those who make an action whilst within the site). However it not longer records a visit if the visitor does not elicit an action whilst within the site. For example if someone landed on a page and read the information they wanted to read, but made no action, this would no longer count as a visit. Is this right?

 

All rather confusing!

It's still a session, but if they didn't interact then it'll be a single page view bounced session.

 

If they interact then it won't be, it'll track a visit time.

 

I'd always stick an event on anything worth tracking, such as external clicks and internal page clicks that don't navigate away such as a social icon/share. At least that way you can understand what people do on the page before they leave.

For example, today we had 187 Google organic visits to MM and many landed on the blog.

 

The blog typically exhibits a relatively high bounce compared to the other pages.

 

However I have a goal set, setup, for page interactions so I can see 'value' beyond the core metrics of visit time and bounce.

 

edit: 221 actually, I forgot to refresh my GA (it's been open an hour).

Edited May 20, 201412 yr by MMMedia

So for example, if I go to Audience Overview and I look at the heading 'session', which say is about 5,000 then this would actually be just the number of visits I have had (they are just using actions in case a website does not allow cookies etc to register a visit).

 

Sorry if I sound stupid, but this does seem confusing for my small brain.

Edited May 20, 201412 yr by neil0wen

To keep things simple think:

 

Sessions = visits

Users = uniques

 

With the caveat that a unique visit is hard to track so not a super accurate and therefore meaningful metric.

Thanks for explaining this to me!

Thanks for explaining this to me!

 

Invoice should be in your inbox by now!

 

I was also interested in this question. Thanks for a good explanation guys)