The session and the visit: artificial analysis concepts that we assume to be natural.
Before going into GA4 itself, I would like to review what it is and where the concept of session or visit comes from.
For many years, we call “visits” that set of data
Events, page views, purchases that occurr from the time the user enter our website until they finish browsing or went to another website. A website had visits, and each visit was a different experience within its pages.
This concept of visit matur
Some even tri to call it “navigations” to be more strict. But with the appearance of mobile apps, where one no longer “visit” an app but simply us it, the line data entire sector adopt the term “sessions” as something more generic than visit, although in reality it referr to exactly the same thing. It was just a change to a more standard name.
Technically, it is something quite arbitrary
To the point that it is not the same depending on what system you use to measure them. The fact is that for people, a session does not exist: we do not intentionally create sessions, we just browse and/or use apps. It is the measurement system that decides when we get involved in something to pigeonhole our experiences into different browsing sessions. And to do so, it invents rules that define which part of our data is a session and which part becomes something else.
To make this separation, there are
Many criteria that we could take into account: IPs, cookies, clicks, domains, time between interactions. The measurement tool must decide how to use them to unequivocally delimit sessions. And no, no tool uses them exactly the same. That’s the beauty of snbd host the matter. We talk about sessions as if they were something firm and indisputable and, in practice, they never coincide between tools. If only we knew which of the tools is the one that “does it right.”