Sessions in GA - need clarifications

[seoug_2005]

Hello,

Regarding recent change in how Google now defines a session...

If a user visits a site from a different traffic  source (say  Google and Bing ) within 30 minutes, would that show 2 visits now ?

Was earlier it considered 1 visit ?

Also, sessions ends "at the end of the day"   It can be different for different users ? How does Google defines end of the day ? for USA time ?

Thanks

[seoug_2005]

Thanks Understood.

Also, if a visitor closes his browser before 30 minutes, would sessions continue ?

What if he closes the browser after 30 minutes ?

[Daylan]

Sorry, that was a bit of a misleading sentence. I just meant the servertime that's seen by analytics. The only other instance would be if your GA is linked to your adwords account, then it'd feed off the timezone defined in your adwords account.

[seoug_2005]

Thanks Daylan for your quick response.  What is meant by "server time of the site as per the analytics account settings". Where can we see those in GA ?

[Daylan]

Hey Atul, There's a bit of chatter about it on the analytics blog here:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/08/update-to-sessions-in-google-analytics.html

Looks like end of day refers to server time of the site as per the analytics account settings. As for the different traffic sources, from what i can gather it would show as two sessions now. Different origin, different sessions.

Sounds like theres gonna be some wacky stats in a lot of analytics accounts over the next few weeks.

Hope that helps.