How to track and analyze your sessions in Google Analytics 4

When visiting your ecommerce site, one person may spend over an hour loading up their cart. Another may open your homepage—and close it in less than three seconds. 

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) calls both of these wildly different visits ‘sessions’. But to get the most mileage out of your data and learn where to focus your digital marketing efforts, you need to dive deeper into the types of sessions in GA4.

What is a session in Google Analytics 4? 

In Google Analytics 4, a session is an interval in which a user interacts with your website or web app. Say someone lands on your site, clicks a call-to-action (CTA) button, and closes the browser tab 3 minutes later to head to lunch. That distinct grouping of interactions counts as 1 session. 

But it’s not quite that simple. While its predecessor, Universal Analytics (UA), only identified 1 type of session, GA4 has 3 distinct session metrics: 

1. Sessions

2. Engaged sessions

3. Engaged sessions per active user 

These data points give you different ways to understand and increase traffic to your website or web app, so it’s essential to understand what each term means.

1. Sessions

A session is any period of interaction on your site by an individual user. 

When someone lands on your website or opens your app in the foreground, GA4 automatically logs a ‘session_start’ event (as long as they don’t already have an active session running). 

For calculation purposes, GA4 also assigns each session:

• A session ID (ga_session_id): a timestamp of when your user started the session

• A session number (ga_session_number): the session count for a particular user 

The session ends when the user leaves your website—or automatically after 30 minutes of inactivity. 

💡 Pro tip: you can adjust the default session timeout settings in a simple, 3-step process.

1. Go to the ‘Admin’ icon in the bottom left corner of GA4

2. Click on ‘Data streams,’ and select your relevant site or web app

3. Select ‘Configure tag settings’, ‘Adjust session timeout’ to extend or shorten this period, then hit save 

GA4 lets you customize your session timeout settings 

Where to find sessions in GA4

Sessions data is available in ‘Reports’ > ‘Reports snapshot’. This page shows you the number of total sessions per default channel group, so you can evaluate how successful your campaigns are at driving traffic to your site or app. 

For example, if you just launched a series of new social media ads, you could check this section to see if your organic social traffic has increased.

The Reports snapshot breaks down total sessions by channel. For this website, most sessions start when a user enters the URL directly.

2. Engaged sessions 

Unlike regular sessions, engaged sessions must meet certain criteria. An engaged session is one that lasts more than 10 seconds, features a key event (as defined by you—an action that’s important to your business, such as a conversion) or includes at least 2 pageviews or screenviews. 

Say a user searches Google for ‘crochet kit for beginners’ and clicks on the first sponsored ad at the top of the page. If they purchase that crochet kit, that’s an engaged session. If they stay on the product page for a few seconds and then click on the Returns & Shipping page, that’s also considered an engaged session. 

The engaged sessions metric is important because it shows how well your website or product resonates with your target user. If they find your content valuable, interesting, or helpful, you’ll see more engaged sessions. 

Where to find engaged sessions in GA4

You can see your engaged sessions by heading to the Traffic acquisition report (‘Acquisition’ > ‘Traffic acquisition’). Scroll down past the line graph, and you’ll see both your engaged sessions and your total session number. 

This context is useful: you might discover that most sessions start with users entering your URL directly into the address bar—but that organic social click-throughs produce a higher rate of engaged sessions.

Also take note of the ‘Engagement rate’ column. This describes the percentage of your overall sessions which are considered engaged. 

Understand what percentage of your sessions are considered engaged with the Traffic acquisition report

3. Engaged sessions per active user

Engaged sessions per active user is the ratio of engaged sessions to the total number of active users. 

The engaged sessions per active user metric contextualizes the engaged sessions metric and helps you measure the effectiveness of your site. Knowing you have 500 engaged sessions over the month doesn’t tell you much on its own. That figure could describe the behavior of 500 site visitors who didn’t find what they were looking for, or 300-ish people, many of whom visited twice—firstly to explore your offer, and secondly to make a purchase. 

Where to find engaged sessions per active user in GA4

This metric takes center stage on the ‘Engagement overview’ report (‘Engagement’ > ‘Overview’). Click on engaged sessions per active user to see a line graph of this metric’s change over time. (By default, GA4 will show you the past 28 days. Change this by clicking on the date range on the upper right side of the screen.)

Find data on engaged sessions per user on the ‘Engagement overview’ report in GA4

💡 Pro tip: monitor the average session duration for your site or web app. This metric, calculated by dividing the total time of engaged sessions by the total sessions, helps you gauge people’s interest in your product, service, or brand. 

GA4 doesn’t offer this metric by default, but it’s simple to create a report that includes it: 

1. Click on the ‘Explore’ tab on the left side of the screen. Scroll down the template gallery to ‘Use cases’ and click on ‘Acquisition’. 

2. Scroll down the ‘Variables’ menu on the left until you get to ‘Metrics’, then click on the plus icon to add your own metric 

3. Search for ‘Average session duration’ and click save 

4. Your custom acquisition report will update automatically 

Head to the ‘Explore’ tab and use the ‘Acquisition’ template to create a report that shows average session duration 

Why you can’t rely on GA4 sessions alone (and how to get the data you need)

Once you dig into sessions in GA4, you’ll find you have many questions. That’s because Google Analytics tells you what’s happening on your site, but it can’t tell you why. 

For example, GA4 might tell you that most of your sessions stem from organic search, but few engaged sessions do. Cue questions like: what is it about your site that’s causing your users to bounce? And how do you enhance your user experience so you have more engaged sessions per active user in the future? 

When you want to answer these questions—and balance quantitative and qualitative insights—you need to look outside of GA4. Luckily, an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare integrates with Google Analytics to help you fill in the gaps about sessions. Here’s how.

1. Heatmaps

GA4 can tell you how many engaged sessions you have, but it can’t provide the nitty-gritty details about how users interact with your web pages. 

Contentsquare Heatmaps visualizes aggregate user behavior data. You can also sort heatmaps by country, traffic source, and device type to see how specific segments behave during their sessions.

You can also view multiple types of heatmaps, depending on what kind of user behavior you’re most interested in:

• Click maps show you where users click on the page 

• Scroll maps indicate how far they scroll

• Move maps show where users move their mouse on the page

By supplementing GA4 data with heatmaps, you see how people use your site—and how to make customer-centric improvements to keep them coming back for more.

Contentsquare offers various types of heatmaps to show you where users clicked during their session

2. Session Replays

GA4 notes that a session happened and tells you whether the user engaged during that session. But it’s one thing to see your numbers rise or fall in GA4, and another thing to actually watch the session itself unfold. 

With Contentsquare Session Replay, you see sessions from the user’s perspective. You can watch as your user frantically clicks on a broken link or whizzes by a required form field in the checkout flow. You feel their frustration alongside them—and get seriously motivated to make changes to your site.

Contentsquare automatically sorts replays by frustration score—that is, behavioral indicators that a user experienced friction—so you can identify sessions where something went wrong 

3. Surveys

Content marketers and product managers love to see an increase in engaged sessions in GA4—and shudder at the sight of a drop. But monitoring these numbers won’t tell you why your metrics have shifted. 

One way to get this info—fast—is through Contentsquare Surveys. In seconds, you can create and launch a survey to ask your users for their opinions directly. Try 1 of 2 super speedy ways: 

1. Start from a free template for common projects like an exit-intent survey, which asks users why they’re leaving, or a post-purchase survey, which asks users how satisfied they are after buying something on your site

2. Use Contentsquare’s AI technology to generate questions based on your goals—then tweak and customize your survey so it looks and feels completely on-brand

Surveys let you gather additional data about a user’s session. Create them fast with Contentsquare’s AI for surveys.

4. Journey Analysis

Your users are on a journey from awareness of your brand to conversion and beyond. When GA4 registers an engaged session on your site, it captures one small but significant moment in your funnel. But wouldn’t it be helpful to understand which pages those engaged users passed through—-i.e., how those engaged sessions map onto customer journeys? 

Contentsquare Journey Analysis lets you visualize all the steps to conversion (or to exit). It turns your customer journey data into an interactive chart, so you can see which pages users typically pass through, and where they tend to drop off. This helps you identify which pages to optimize to increase conversions.

Journey Analysis helps you understand the user journeys behind your ‘engaged sessions’ metric

Understand your sessions with GA4 + Contentsquare 🤝

GA4 and Contentsquare work together to give you the insights you need to understand users’ sessions on your site. With the quantitative session metrics GA4 supplies—and Contentsquare’s behavioral and contextual data to fill in the gaps—you’ll develop a deep understanding of what users want from your site or web app, so you can give it to them.

FAQs about Google Analytics sessions