New changes to the way Google Analytics tracks session data

Posted on Tags: Web, Ecommerce, SEO, Browsers, Conversion Rates

Google recently made several changes to the way a ‘session’ is defined in your website’s analytics. We like to study our clients’ Google analytics data, because it helps us to measure the success of any internet marketing campaign. It also helps us to understand how visitors interact with a website.

So, when we heard about the changes, we naturally wanted to find out more and make sure we knew the impact they would have.

What actually changed?

To understand the changes, it helps to know how Google Analytics previously tracked session data compared to how they are tracking session data going forward.

Before today, Google Analytics ended a session:

• When more than 30 minutes elapsed between page views
• At the end of the day
• When a visitor closed his or her browser

If the visitor returned to the site after one of those events occurred, a new session would begin.

On 12th August 2011, the following changes have been made to session tracking:

• A session is no longer ended when a visitor closes his or her browser window (which means a visitor can leave and come back within 30 minutes on a given day, and their session will continue, even if they change browsers)
• A session will now end when the traffic source for the user changes. This means that if an organic search visitor leaves the site and comes back through a Google AdWords or Pay Per Click ad, his or her previous session will be ended and a new one will start.
• As before, the end of a day, or the passage of more than 30 minutes between page views, will cause a session to end.

The impact

Google has stated that this change may slightly increase the number of visits tracked to a site, but based on their research, “most users will see less than a 1% change”.

This latest change also allows Google Analytics to track attribution data more accurately following the recent ‘multi-channel funnel advanced tracking data change’. This allows you to track the attribution of a conversion from the first-click source e.g. Google AdWords to the last-click source e.g. Google Organic. This is extremely useful when recording the effectiveness of pay per click marketing as it tells us from which source a customer originally found your website.


If you’ve seen any changes in your analytics data since this change was implemented, please leave us a comment, or drop me an email at dominic.lidgett@strawberry.co.uk and we can discuss this with you in more detail.