Session

A group of interactions one visitor has with your website within a period of time.

What it means

A session is one visit to your website. During one session, a person might view three pages, watch a video and fill a form.

One person can have many sessions. If Rohan visits your site in the morning and again in the evening, that usually counts as two sessions but one user.

How it works

In GA4, a session starts when someone opens a page or screen, and their actions after that are linked to it.

A session ends after a period of inactivity. By default, GA4 ends a session after 30 minutes of inactivity. So if a visitor leaves your tab open, goes for chai, and comes back 40 minutes later, GA4 starts a new session. This timeout can be adjusted in GA4 settings.

GA4 also marks some sessions as engaged sessions. A session counts as engaged if it lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event (what GA4 used to call a conversion), or has two or more page or screen views.

Sessions = number of separate visits to your site in a chosen time period

A simple example

A coaching institute in Kota runs a website for its JEE batches. On Monday, a student visits the fee page, reads it for five minutes and leaves. On Wednesday, she comes back, checks the timetable and fills the enquiry form. GA4 records one user and two sessions. Both are engaged, and the second one also includes a key event.

Why it matters

Sessions help you understand how often people visit and how deeply they engage. Many other metrics depend on sessions, like engagement rate, bounce rate and conversion rate.

Beginner tips

• Compare sessions with users to see if people come back more than once.
• Look at engaged sessions, not just total sessions, to judge quality.
• Common mistake: treating sessions and users as the same thing. One user can create many sessions.

Related: GA4, Bounce rate, Engagement rate