What Is Session Count and How to Use It Posted on October 10, 2019 by Dave Fowler   #business intelligence #data
This article was originally posted on Chartio Blog

Session count is a record of the number of times a user visits your website within a given timeframe. It makes use of a cookie on the user's browser to track the user's activity between the time they enter and the time they leave your domain.

Sessions create a record of all the interactions each of your visitors is having on your website, including all the pages they view and the engagements they make with events, calls-to-action, forms, etc. Further, a session expires 30 minutes after the user leaves your domain. However, if the user exceeds the default 30-minute limit before coming back on your website, the session count will take that as two separate sessions. On the other hand, if the user comes back within half an hour of the time they left, the two visits will be recorded as a single session in the session count. Sessions can be customized to be as short as two minutes and as long as four hours.

Session counts only track interaction hits. Planners get to choose user actions that count as interaction hits and focus on them. When sorting out elements, consider what you would want bounce rate, average session duration, and other essential metrics to encompass as they only capture interaction hits.

How to Calculate Session Count

When calculating the number of sessions, it is essential to note that Analytics focuses on sessions over individual users. For that reason, you are likely to be working with figures bigger than the number of users that have actually been on your website over a specified period of time.

As stated earlier, each visit or page view (from a different browser or the same browser but with the visits being at least 30 minutes apart) is counted as a session. If a user pays their maiden visit to your website on, say, January, and fails to visit again that month, the user's number of sessions will be 1. If they visit twice it will be two, and so on. For a better and more compressed view of your data, consider checking the Frequency and Recency report, which gives you cumulative counts for specified periods. For example, users that paid two visits each in January will fall in the row for two while those who visited only once will be listed under the row for 1. The total session count will not take into account the number of times specific users visited the website.

For a better understanding of how to measure session counts, let's look at two hypothetical users – User X and User Y – and their statistics over three months, January through March. User X visits the website twice in January, thrice in February, and four times in March, while User Y visits once in February and two twice in March. Assuming these were the website's only users for the three months, the data represented in the histogram over the three months will be as follows:

January

1 session: 0

2 sessions: 1

February

1 session: 1

2 sessions: 0

3 sessions: 1

March

1 session: 0

2 sessions: 1

3 sessions: 0

4 sessions: 1

How to Interpret Session Count

Data from Google Analytics can be complicated especially when you are starting to get increased traffic into your website. Tools such as Chartio help you make sense of these figures and get a view of your data from more than just one angle. Session count can help you understand a lot about the way users are interacting with your website and where you are losing most of your prospects. You can use it to monitor the performance of your new marketing campaigns and assess the ease of navigation on your website.

One of the more widespread uses of session counts is identifying the level of interest of different users and knowing which ones are qualified for engagement and which ones are mere sightseers.

Best Practices for Measuring Session Count

For optimal utility, here are a few practices to implement when tracking session counts on your website:

1. Use different methods to visualize the data:
2. Base your session timeout settings on empirical user statistics
3. Ensure all essential elements are marked as interaction hits

How to Visualize Session Count

While histograms make for a reasonably accurate method of visualizing session counts, they can be shallow and unviable for detailed analyses. Actually, in many instances, no one session visualization method can perfectly capture all the elements and aspects you wish to focus on. You need to use them in combinations.

Here are a few practical ways of visualizing the number of sessions:

Histogram

There are several ways through which you can present your data on a histogram. You can plot your total session count against time to check your traffic progress over time or use new traffic data only to see how many new users you have gained over the months. You can also check the percentage of users that have visited your site more than once, and the progress of it over time.

Line Charts

Line charts may not be as accurate as histograms on the fundamental level, but they make for a better way of monitoring progress. What's more, they are easier to squeeze to cover more extended periods. You can use line charts to display just as many different combinations of data as histograms.

Bar + Line Charts

This is a blend of both a bar chart or a histogram and a line chart. You can use it to analyze the same pair of data in depth or plot two different sets of data. The latter is a pretty unorthodox way of utilizing bar + line graphs, but it may help you get around the need for further analysis of your data. For instance, instead of having two separate histograms for session count increase in absolute terms and increase in percentage, you can have them both in the same visual. Inferences are easier to make when this is the case.

Common Session Count Misuses

Session count is one great way to monitor traffic growth, bounce rate, and other metrics on your website, but it can also be misused to give potentially misleading results. One common way planners misuse GA counts is randomly calibrating session timeout settings. By default, sessions last 30 minutes. If, for example, you reduce this to one minute, your session count will probably increase, but you are likely to count the same sessions more than once erroneously. Small interruptions such as brief internet disconnections will be mistaken for purposeful exits.

Proxy Metrics for Session Count

Tracking users with adblockers is one of the biggest challenges digital planners and marketers face. When a user is using an adblocker, it means you are not able to track their activity on your website. The use of a proxy server is the most common way to bypass this, but it isn't the only way. Counting page view is a more ethical and hassle-free method to get crucial cumulative information about your user-base, including the number of users using adblockers.

Related Metrics

Some of the metrics related to session count include:

1. Average Session Duration, which shows you the average amount of time users spend on your website. It is calculated by adding up all sessions over a given timeframe and dividing it by the number of sessions.
2. Bounce Rate: Bounce rate shows the percentage of your user-base that engaged in only one interaction on your website. To get your website's bounce rate, you divide the number of bounces or single requests by the number of sessions over a given timeframe.
3. Pages per Session: This is the average number of pages viewed by each user per session. To find your website's Pages/Session, you divide the number of page views over a period of time by that of sessions over the same period.
4. Sessions per Channel: Channel classification helps you track users by their source. This can be quite helpful in assessing the performances of different marketing strategies. Sessions per Channel refers to the number of sessions that each channel grouping is responsible for.

Tools for Measuring Session Count

Session recording tools help planners monitor visitor sessions between the time they click into when they leave the domain. The tools usually have heat mapping features or can be paired with heat mapping tools to help users identify critical points of interactions for visitors. Standard tools with these facilities include:

1. Crazy Egg
2. MouseStats
3. ClickTale

Conclusion

Session count is a secret doorway to solutions to some of the most nerve-wracking business problems. With the help of a tool that blends the feature with other crucial analytical information about your website, you can make the most out of your session count data and incredibly reduce your workload. Chartio not only provides you with an interface for better visualization of your data but also lets you turn your focus on the performance of specific features. Connect your database with the business intelligence tool today and get all your business data accessible from a single interface.