Page Views Vs Sessions Vs Users
Google analytics is the one tool every marketer in the digital age loves and uses everyday. It is where we see results in real-time and make can make timely decision that will impact business growth.
As marketers, how do you measure traffic to your website? On GA, I go to the Acquisition report & immediately see 3 metrics which gives me an idea of how I'm acquiring visits to my website: Page Views, Sessions and Users.
But what are these three metrics and how are they different from each other? Anyone who uses GA must have noticed that these metrics follow a hierarchical order: Page Views will show the highest number, followed by Sessions and Users.
Page Views, in my opinion is easy to understand. It is just the total number of times the pages on your website was viewed.
Sessions. A session has a start time as well as an end time. Google Analytics uses special cookies to track sessions that come with an expiration term of 30 minutes. So a session can be a collection of interactions that occurs on your website in a time span of 30 minutes.
When do sessions end? Sessions can end in 3 different ways:
- When the visitor is inactive on your website for more than 30 minutes (Happens to me always when I drift to online shopping by opening new tabs!)
- When midnight strikes: So if I am viewing a website from 11:50 PM to 12:10 AM, GA counts my time as 2 sessions of 10 minutes each rather than 1 session of 20 minutes.
- When you close the tab/or navigate to a different website
Users: Cookies are used again by Google Analytics to track the visitors to your website. When a user lands on a web page, a unique user ID is created by GA. The browser stores this ID as a cookie, identified to a particular user on a specific browser. So if the same user visits your website from a different device, GA will assign another unique ID to that user for that special browser. Hence the importance of looking at Users Vs New Users Vs Returning Users.
Finally, a practical example.
Say I, Kirti Nambisan, visit my own website on Feb 11, 2020 at 11:45 PM till Feb 12, 2020 12:15 AM. When on the website, I browse through 4 pages: Home page, About me, Blog landing and contact me page. GA records my stats as:
User: 1
Session: 2
Page Views: 4
I am a User who created 2 sessions and views 4 pages on this website.
Ping me if you want to know more or are keen to discuss!
I am a growth marketer with extensive experience in growing businesses in the SaaS and B2B space, and currently living in Sydney, Australia. I am always looking forward to having conversations around marketing, startups, analytics and growth.