When will google analytics end a session by default?

In this article, we will explore five common Google Analytics 4 mistakes that can easily happen and provide practical tips to avoid them. 1. Not Setting Data Retention Period GA4 comes with a two-month data retention period by default, and you have the option to set it to 14 months. The retention period is applied to custom reports in explorations, whereas data in the standard reports never expire. Once the retention period has passed, data will be automatically deleted – which means if you don’t change that setting as you set up GA4, you will not be able to run YoY custom reports and will lose valuable historical data. In order to change the retention period, navigate to Data Settings> Date Retention, and in the dropdown, choose 14 months. In other words, each time a user engages in a new activity, their data retention period gets extended for another 14 months. Honestly, I can’t think of a use case when you would choose to turn that option off, so I keep it switched on. 2. Dimensions With High Cardinality High-cardinality dimensions are dimensions that contain more than 500 unique values within a single day. This can present challenges and limitations in data analysis within GA4. Cardinality in GA4 can negatively affect data accuracy and reliability. For example, when you track the exact word count as a custom dimension on every article page, you may end up having high cardinality if you have thousands of articles because the word count can be different for every article...

Google Analytics helps business owners optimize and better understand how visitors use their website and also measures the impact of digital marketing strategies to aid website growth and revenue. Having a clear insight into what Google Analytics sessions are and how they operate is vital for all business owners. Having the expertise to interpret the metrics gathered across your website’s user sessions is crucial for understanding how well your website is performing. Here is what you need to know about Google Analytics sessions. What Is a Google Analytics Session? A session in Google Analytics is a collection of user activity with your website that is tracked over a specific period. Every user action on the website is captured in a session. A single session, for instance, may include several page visits, social activities, occurrences, and e-commerce transactions. Think of a session as a container for all of the actions that a user makes on your site. Tracking your website session is essential because it makes it easier to comprehend and evaluate the efficacy of your marketing strategy. When does a Default Analytics Session Expire? Regarding time-based expiration, by default, a Google Analytics session lasts until there has been no activity for When a user leaves a page on your website open while taking a break and resumes the activity, Analytics will reset a new 30-minutes expiry since the resumption is perceived as a new session. On the other hand, campaign-based expirat...

Google Analytics Sessions: No, this is not a collection of Google Analytics's greatest guitar-shredding jams! Sessions are how Google Analytics tracks each time your website visitors come to your site. Understanding sessions can be a bit confusing and figuring out how Google calculates sessions can get even more confusing. Don't despair. We have created this blog post and the video to clear up any session confusion. We will explain how Google Analytics sessions are calculated. Then we'll break down how sessions are tracked, and how they impact your analytics. We'll also show you an advanced strategy you can use to make sure your sessions are tracking correctly. To round out this session jam, we'll answer a question from one of our How are Google Analytics sessions calculated? When a webpage loads in a user's browser window, that triggers the start of a session. Once the web page finishes loading, the analytics tracking code sends data to Google. Think of it like your website sending out a bat-signal over Gotham city. In this case, your website is commissioner Gordon, Google Analytics is Batman, and your tracking code is Gotham city. Ok, that analogy might have made you more confused. Fine, we'll go back to the boring explanation. The tracking code data you send to Google is recorded by Google Analytics for your account ID, and this marks the beginning of a session. A session is the starting point for Google's measurement of a web user's experience. A session can involve ma...

GA4 is a new kind of • • Collects both website and app data to better understand the customer journey • Uses event-baseddatainstead of session-based • Includes privacy controls such as cookieless measurement, and behavioral and conversion modeling • Predictive capabilities offer guidance without complex models • Direct integrations to media platforms help drive actions on your website or app On July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will no longer processdata. You'll be able to see your Universal Analytics reports for a period of time after July 1, 2023.However, new data will only flow into Google Analytics 4 properties. 360 Universal Analytics properties will receive a one-time processing extension ending on July 1, 2024. There are three ways to get started if you are an editor or administrator: Option 1: Set up Analytics data collection for the first time Do this if you’re new to Analytics and ready to collect data for your website and/or app. Option 2: Add Google Analytics 4 to a site with Universal Analytics (Analytics “classic”) The GA4 Setup Assistant will add a Google Analytics 4 property alongside your existing Universal Analytics property. Your Universal Analytics property will continue to collect data. You can access both using the property selector in the Admin area. Option 3: Add Google Analytics 4 to a website builder platform or CMS (content management system) Do this if you use a CMS-hosted (Content Management System) website, e.g. a web...

I would like to divide the traffic between registered and unregistered users with a custom variable. The Analytics documentation suggests to use a session-level custom variable for this purpose. However, what is very common for our users is to log out when they are done using our service, because they are often working on shared computers. At log out, the session-level custom variable would be overwritten by 'unregistered', because this happens in the same session. Is it somehow possible to end the Google Analytics session when a user logs out and start a new session? You can set One thing you could do instead is to delete GA's cookies when a user logs out. This will immediately end the session and start a new session on next page load. In case you aren't aware, there are some things to note about this stuff, since multiple people are using the same computer. Basically you can't rely on certain metrics like visitors and unique visitors. Whether sessions timeout naturally, or whether they are forced from first option (the visitor cookie is preserved), metrics will show up as the same visitor having multiple visits. If you go the 2nd route (deleting the cookies), it will count each new session as a new visitor, but you are going to destroy being able to see visitors coming in for multiple visits. So no matter what you do, there's no easy way to track multiple users on the same computer and get reliable visit metrics. Some things that you can do to help: Designate a custom va...

Calling location.reload() acts the same as clicking the refresh button in your browser. Since it is not resetting the GA cookie, the GA session will not end. By default, the GA session expires after 30 minutes of inactivity. See It is important to note that refreshing the page will be recognized as activity by GA. If you are refreshing the page after 30 seconds of inactivity, the session will never expire assuming that the user never leaves the page. If you would like to manually control when a GA session is started and ended, see @fraxture it is not mentioned anywhere that I know of. Google must just assume that the implementor understands the concept that sessions are identified by a browser cookie. With that said, it is a poor assumption on Google's part since the industry is evolving in a direction that non-technical users are able to implement experiments. Perhaps it is mentioned in the Google Optimize docs somewhere as that tool requires minimal coding knowledge.

This information in this article applies only to web tracking. The calculations don’t apply if you’re collecting data using an Analytics SDK for a mobile OS. The concept of a session in Analytics is important to understand because many features, reports, and metrics depend on how Analytics calculates sessions. In this article: • • • • Overview A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. For example a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions. You can think of a session as the container for the actions a user takes on your site. A single user can open multiple sessions. Those sessions can occur on the same day, or over several days, weeks, or months. As soon as one session ends, there is then an opportunity to start a new session. There are two methods by which a session ends: • Time-based expiration: • After 30 minutes of inactivity • At midnight • Campaign change: • If a user arrives via one campaign, leaves, and then comes back via a different campaign. Time based expiration How long does a session last? By default, a session lasts until there's 30 minutes of inactivity, but you can adjust this limit so a session lasts from a few seconds to several hours. When a user, say Bob, arrives on your site, Analytics starts counting from that moment. If 30 minutes pass without any kind of interaction from Bob, the session ends. However, every time Bob inter...