Visitor #2 spent 60 seconds on your site.Visitor #1 spent 180 seconds on your site.

Google Analytics calculates average session duration by dividing the total duration of all sessions (in seconds) during a specified time frame by the total number of sessions during that same time frame.įor example, say in one week you had three website visitors: How Does Google Analytics Calculate Average Session Duration? The reason the timer stops after 30 minutes of inactivity is to prevent your average session duration from being artificially inflated in cases where, for example, someone accidentally left your website open on his/her work computer all weekend. That timer stops when the user ends the session via leaving your site, or it stops when the user has been inactive for 30 minutes. When a session starts, Google Analytics begins timing the session. So if one person visits your site 15 separate times during a week, those 15 visits would be counted as 15 sessions. If that same user comes back a few days later and visits your website again, that’s counted as another session. Everything a user does during that visit is counted as a single session.

A session starts when someone views a page on your website and ends either when they leave your website or after 30 minutes of inactivity. What Is a Session in Google Analytics?Ī session in Google Analytics is simply a visit to your website.

9 Ways to Increase Your Average Session Durationīut to fully understand what average session duration means, we need to answer a few more questions.

Benchmark: What Is a Good Average Session Duration?.

How Does Google Analytics Calculate It?.

So to find out how you can improve your average session duration, we asked dozens of marketers to share how they keep users on their sites for longer. You can’t improve it by advertising, by stuffing more keywords onto your page, or by writing more clickbaity headlines. Only users, bounce rate, and sessions ranked higher.īut like bounce rate, average session duration is one of those signals based on merit, meaning it’s hard to game it. So where does something like average session duration fall in terms of importance?Īccording to our research, average session duration is the fourth-most-tracked Google Analytics metric. returning users, goal completions: the list goes on and on. There are tons of metrics that marketers track in Google Analytics to measure engagement.īounce rate, pageviews, new vs.

Session meaning