Sessions in GA - need clarifications
-
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
-
Thanks Understood.
Also, if a visitor closes his browser before 30 minutes, would sessions continue ?
What if he closes the browser after 30 minutes ?
-
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.
-
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 ?
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Help! Need to Get Traffic Back Up in Saturated Market
I was looking in one of my client's Google Analytics profiles, and noticed that they had two major drops in traffic before we started working with them—and they've never really recovered. The first, and most significant drop was around January 2015. And then the again, but not as drastic of a drop, was around September 2015. They are a heating and cooling company, but they are located out west so this shouldn't be a seasonality thing. Here is a link to what the BIG drop is traffic looks like in January 2015: http://imgur.com/a/Y1s8U To get a clearer picture, here are the numbers for the overall website traffic:
Reporting & Analytics | | BlueCorona
September 1, 2015 - September 30, 2015: 30,923 sessions
September 1, 2015 - September 30, 2016: 13,768 sessions Year over year traffic to the website dropped by 55%. Here is a link to what year over year looks like in Google Analytics: http://imgur.com/a/TPdJQ Like I said, we weren't working with them at the time so I don't know specifics about what might have caused this, but their numbers have never even come close to reaching what they used to be prior to the noticeable drop after September 2015. Does anyone have any insights into why this might be? Was there an algorithm change back then that could still be impacting them? Any ideas how to get them back to where they once were? Any input is greatly appreciated! Thanks.1 -
GA: How do I preserve custom dimension across domain and subdomain?
Using custom dimensions our site tracks logged-in vs not logged-in users on our shop site (shop.example.com). A user can only login on the shop.example.com. The problem is when the logged in user visits our the main domain (example.com), we lose the custom dimension and the user becomes anonymous. At this point, if the user goes back to shop.example.com, the logged-in custom dimension comes back. How do I preserve the logged-in user dimension across the main domain? Example of snippet:
Reporting & Analytics | | Evan340 -
Days to transaction - GA
Hi We have noticed a trend with days to transaction being high for May - June for Organic for 28+ days. Does anyone have any helpful articles or ideas on why this is happening for organic?
Reporting & Analytics | | BeckyKey0 -
Google Analytics Stopped Tracking Visits - NEED HELP!
Hi Moz Community, I have about 10 sites, static HTML sites and WordPress sites, which ALL stopped tracking Google Analytics on August 2nd. They go to a flat-line! Dead! No data! Has anyone else experienced this either currently or before? I have confirmed all code is correct as it's been tracking these sites for years. One site gets 5,000+ visits a month and they are sitting at only 1,500 now and will be a fun conversation to have with the client. If all code is correct, what should I do? How do I overcome this without having to re-create another account/tracking ID? Never dealt with something like this before and there is not much on the web or in other forums. Would appreciate any help or advice or tips! - Patrick
Reporting & Analytics | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Weird Math in GA Ecommerce Tracking
Hi everybody. I've recently discovered that I have a problem with the ecommerce tracking on a client's website. The client sells concert tickets at an average price of $10 per ticket. The custom ecommerce platform they use is kind of unusual; the same product often has different SKUs, but not always. This isn't associated with different seats, etc. In fact, I don't yet know why they've set it up that way. The problem that I'm facing is this: the data in Analytics is calculating the "average price" of a SKU item as the total price. If, for example, the actual average price for a SKU item is $10 and four of those SKU items were sold, Analytics will tell me the average price is $40. This means that the total revenue for that SKU shows up as $40 x 4 = $160. Needless to say, this is enormously skewing the data. Here's a screenshot. Note, it's the same product: http://screencast.com/t/JyLQkb3jzz6s The total revenue for ticket sales is way off because of this, and I'm not sure if it's a problem with the ecommerce tracking code in Analytics, or something that the ecomm platform is doing. Have any of you experienced anything like this, and if so is it a fix in Analytics? Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | newwhy0 -
See which Google TLD organic traffic is coming from in GA
Hi all, I'm working with a client that is marketing to English speaking ex-pats in Thailand. I have a suspicion that many of these ex-pats are searching through google.com (or .co.uk) instead of google.co.th. In Google Analytics (or any other tracking tool), is there a way to see which country-specific Google domain organic searches are coming from? Thanks, Tim
Reporting & Analytics | | TimKelsey0 -
Need a tool for finding new links from analytics
I'd like to get a weekly report of all of the brand new referral links that have come in to my site over the last week. Is this something that can be done in google analytics? Is there a better tool for this out there? Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | seo-hunter0