Analytics Glossary

Sessions

One visit, start to finish — the container for everything a visitor does.

A session is a group of interactions a single visitor has with your website within a defined time window. A session begins when a visitor arrives on your site and ends after a period of inactivity (typically 30 minutes). If a user visits your site, leaves for an hour, then returns, that counts as two sessions.

Think of a session as one trip to your shop. During that trip the visitor might look at three products, read your about page, and check your opening hours — that is still one session containing five page views. Sessions are the unit most other engagement metrics are built on: bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration all describe what happens inside a session.

Sessions help you understand engagement patterns — a high session count relative to unique visitors means people are coming back repeatedly. A café whose 300 weekly visitors produce 700 sessions has an audience of regulars; a consultant whose 300 visitors produce 310 sessions is mostly getting one-time researchers, and might focus on giving people a reason to return.

How it works

Crafty Meerkat groups page views and events into sessions automatically — no configuration needed. Your Analytics overview shows session counts for any date range next to visitors and page views, and clicking any visitor’s friendly name (like “Roaming Otter”) opens their history with every page view grouped by session, so you can read individual visits like a story: where they landed, what they read, where they left.

How to put it to work

1
Read sessions next to visitors
On the Analytics overview, compare sessions to unique visitors. Sessions well above visitors means repeat visits — a loyal audience. Roughly equal numbers mean most people visit once.
2
Open a few real sessions
Click visitor names in the Recent Visitors table and read their session histories. Ten minutes of this teaches you more about how customers actually use your site than any single chart.
3
Judge quality, not just quantity
Growing sessions is good; growing converted sessions is better. Set up a goal (a thank-you page visit or a custom event) so each session is measured against the outcome you want.

Tips from the den

◆A visitor who leaves and comes back within the 30-minute idle window continues the same session — so “sessions” will always be a bit lower than “times people opened your site”.
◆Sunday-night spikes in sessions with low conversion often just mean browsing mode; compare weekday and weekend sessions before changing anything.
◆Use sessions as the denominator when comparing campaigns: conversions per session is fairer than conversions per page view.

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Common questions

What is the difference between a session and a visitor?

A visitor is a person; a session is one visit by that person. One visitor who checks your site every morning for a week generates seven sessions. Visitors measure audience size, sessions measure visit frequency.

When does a session end?

After roughly 30 minutes of inactivity. If someone stops interacting — closes the tab, walks away, switches apps — and returns after the window has passed, their next page view starts a new session.

Can one session span multiple days?

Practically no. Because a session ends after about 30 minutes of inactivity, a visit late on Monday and another on Tuesday are always separate sessions, even from the same visitor.