Session Count

Session count is the total number of sessions started on the site in a period; each continuous stretch of a user's activity counts as one session.

Session count is the middle traffic metric, between users (how many people) and pageviews (how many times a page loaded), and the best unit for measuring how many times people came. But everything hinges on the session definition, and this is where the most misunderstanding arises. A session closes on an inactivity timeout — usually thirty minutes — and is renewed by each new interaction, so a user who leaves a page open and clicks an hour later creates two sessions, not one long one. A second, less-known rule: a change of source or channel mid-activity can also start a new session, so traffic credit reaches the right source. The upshot is that session count comes inherently from a rule-based definition rather than a raw tally, and two tools with different rules give two numbers for the same window; before comparing two systems one must put their session definitions side by side.