{"id":255311,"date":"2019-08-12T13:18:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T13:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webscale.com\/?p=255311"},"modified":"2023-12-29T08:35:05","modified_gmt":"2023-12-29T13:35:05","slug":"what-are-ga-sessions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webscale.com\/blog\/what-are-ga-sessions\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are GA Sessions?"},"content":{"rendered":"

And how are they used to calculate billing?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

As a Webscale Stratus customer, you know that your monthly billing is a calculation of Plan Rate plus any overage on Sessions. For example, if you\u2019re on the Stratus Lite plan for $298\/month, you have 25,000 \u201cIncluded Sessions.\u201d Additional sessions are billed at 0.475\u00a2 per session.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what constitutes a \u201csession?\u201d This question comes up often, especially with new clients receiving their first bill with any session overages.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is a Session?<\/b><\/p>\n

According to Google, a Session \u201cis a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame.\u201d For Google\u2019s purposes, a session is a map of a user\u2019s interaction with your website during that user\u2019s visit to your online store. A user may make several online \u201ctrips\u201d to your store, though Google counts all page visits that occur within a set time frame as one session.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take an example. By default, a Google Session is 30 minutes. All pages visited by a user that occur within 30 minutes of one another constitutes a single session. If User A visits your home page, then, within 30 minutes, visits your About Us page, those two \u201chits\u201d are part of the same session.<\/span><\/p>\n

Google will also create a new session for the same user under two additional situations: at midnight and if the user comes to your site via some other marketing campaign. For example, if User B finds your site linked on a blog, then \u2014 even 5 minutes later \u2014 clicks on an ad you\u2019re running in Google, these two interactions would be counted as two sessions.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can set the length of a session at whatever period of time you wish. Session length can affect a lot of data points, including Bounce Rate, Return Visits and many, many more. However, the greatest impact can be on your hosting costs, which we\u2019ll cover in just a moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite any cost implications, your session length should reflect how users interact with your site. If you notice that your \u201cReturning Users\u201d percentage is high, this could indicate that users may be visiting your site, then taking some time to deliberate before making a purchase. Having a longer session time might be in order. On the other hand, being able to identify returning users in order to craft special offers and incentives based on this behavior suggests that you should keep the session length shorter.<\/span><\/p>\n

If in doubt, leave the session length at the Google default until you get enough metrics \u2014 and analysis \u2014 to justify a change. There\u2019s a very good reason (known only to Google) for the 30 minute default.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why Use Google Sessions?<\/b><\/p>\n

Since the very beginning of hosting websites, providers who based pricing on traffic generally use data they collected in web server log files. This actually gave the client \u2014 you \u2014 little control over how the data was collected, measured or used. And it was oftentimes suspect due to collection of traffic from \u201cbots\u201d and other non-user traffic.<\/span><\/p>\n

How Can Session Count Be Managed?<\/b><\/p>\n

When we created Stratus, we knew we needed not only an impartial third-party for data, but we wanted to give our clients more control over the data collected. For instance, you, as a store owner, should not have sessions counted that are:<\/span><\/p>\n