When designing and developing your website, one of the important things you need to consider is that you have to measure its performance properly. By measuring your website’s performance, you can see if your marketing strategy is yielding the desired results or not. One of the measurement criteria for websites is sessions.
A session is a group of interactions a user does within a given time frame of being on your website. Google Analytics Universal’s default time frame for measuring sessions is 30 minutes. This means that whatever a user does on your website within 30 minutes is regarded as a session. With the sessions metric, you can easily know your site’s active users and visitors.
With a Sessions report, you can accurately measure whether your site’s users are actually interacting on it. The sessions report does not consider passive visitors. Hence, if a user opens your website in a separate tab and browses another tab, they would not be counted past the 30-minute session marker. However, you can modify your website’s Session timeout handling to track your users accurately. However, before changing it, Google recommends you consider the following:
- If your website logs a user out after they have been inactive for a certain time
- If your website contains lengthy content you feel your users may spend time on
- If you expect a campaign to run for less than two years
If your website satisfies any of the three points above, it is best for you to change your Session timeout handling so you can track your users’ activity accurately.
