Tracking analytics is essential when it comes to any aspect of online performance. Misunderstanding the difference between these categories in analytics, page views, sessions, and users, is a very common problem that arises when working with clients.

That is why we bring you this article, in order to make it easier to understand these categories. A customer who understands what you’re saying is a happy customer.

What are page views?

Page view is the basic interaction that takes place with your website .

Simply put, when you, as a user , open a web site , create a session and open a page on the site, achieving a page view . If you click on another page on the site and go to it, you get a new page view , but within the same session and as the same user .

Thus, the number of page views is equal to the number of page views on the site, including page refreshes .

Sessions (Sessions)

When you close the browser and open it again, you are still the same user , part of your search history is lost and you start a new session and, of course, a new page view .

You can get more page views in a single session, so that the number of sessions is always smaller than the number of pages viewed.

A session is a name that would be synonymous with a visit, so the number of sessions is actually the number of visits to the site.

In Google Analytics, there is a value called “Pages/Session”. It displays the average number of pages that are opened each time (session). There is no best possible value for this parameter, this is because it varies from site to site depending on the type of content (content) on it . For example, on a blog, this value will be quite low. This is because visitors usually come to the site to read a particular article. On the other hand, on a website that provides some services, this value will be higher. The reason for this is that users will interact with a larger number of pages.

Users (Users)

If your website is opened from a different computer, it will be counted as a new user. In other words, the number of users is the number of different people who have opened your website.

If you open, then close and reopen the browser, you will be the same user, having a different session and viewing pages.

One of the most important parameters when it comes to the category of users is the return rate. It shows how many users actually return to your site with new sessions. If your Return Rate is, for example, 10%, it means that one in ten sessions was made by a user who came to your site before (in this case, for 90 users, you will have 100 sessions).

In contrast to the Return Rate, there is a category of New Users . The name itself indicates that this is the percentage of users who are on the site for the first time. With a Return Rate of 10%, the New Users parameter will logically be 90%. It is evident that the number of users can never exceed the number of sessions or page views.

How to find these parameters in Google Analytics?

And finally the answer to the question where we can find all these reports?

Basic reports on website traffic in Analytics can be found in the Audience section.

Click on the Audience(1) tab in the left main menu in Analytics, then select the first link Overeview(2) and you’ll get a daily session report for the previous couple of days. If you want to get a report on users or page views, simply select the drop-down menu in the upper left corner of the graph and select the type of report you need.