I'm digging through my Google Analytics menu and I can't seem to find a report that displays the total session duration of all users in a time period. Is this possible?
You are looking for Average Session Duration, yes?
Average Session Duration is shown as a sparkline widget in Audience - Overview. You might need to scroll your browser page down to see it.
Avg Session duration is also a column in the Home screen.
If you want Total Session Duration, just multiply total visits by Avg Session Duration. I don't know why you'd want that though - it sounds like a useless statistic.
Related
Looking at Google Analytics Real Time tracking.
Why is there such a difference in the two numbers?
It is a Google Analytics bug, it is an accumulation of the number of active users over time without however the total being decreased once the user is no longer in that state. There is nothing to do, it realigns itself.
https://www.analyticstraps.com/bug-numero-anomalo-di-utenti-attivi-in-tempo-reale/
Is it possible to get the average session duration for new users? For example, if an application has a very poor start screen but awesome once you're able to use it, the average session duration would be high, but the average session duration for new users would be low. Is there a way to figure this out?
You should go to the Audience Report > Behavior> New vs Returning
Within that report you will find the Avg. Session duration.
You can leverage the use of Segments, click on +Add Segment and select the "New User Segment" you will add another line to the chart, play with the metrics and have fun.
Background:
I have a Google Analytics account using which I am tracking user activity for web and mobile app. After logging into your account and choosing the web property and the corresponding view, you generally see a dashboard with quick stats like Pageviews, Users, Sessions, Pages/Sessions, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate and percentage of new sessions. You can change the time period (from the top right area of the Dashboard) to get the same stats for that period.
Problem:
Last week, I was interested in the three main stats: Page views, Users and Sessions for a particular day - say, day A. The dashboard showed the following stats:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 496,068
Sessions - 983,549
This report was based on 100% of sessions.
I go back to the dashboard TODAY and check the same stats for the same day A. Here's what I saw:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 511,071
Sessions - 1,005,517
This report is also based on 100% of sessions.
Nothing was changed in the tracking code for the web and mobile app. Could someone explain why I have this difference in the stats? Is this normal?
They need some time to update the system, otherwise their system would overwhelm
When you first create a profile it can take up to 48 -72 hours for it to start showing data.
After that time data will appear instantly in the Real-time reports.
Standard reports take longer to finish processing. You need to remember the amount of data that is being processed. Some of the data may appear in the standard reports after a few hours. The numbers have not completed processing for at least 24 hours, so anything you look at then will not be accurate.
When checking Google Analytics never look at todays or yesterdays numbers in the standards reports, if you want accurate information. Things get even more confusing when you consider time zones. When exactly is it yesterday? I have noticed numbers changing as far back as 48 hours. But Google Says in there documentation 24 hours. I am looking for the link in the documentation will post it when I find it.
Found it: Data Limits
Data processing latency
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more
than 200,000 sessions per day to Google Analytics will result in the
reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to
reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day
processing, reduce the number of sessions you send to < 200,000 per
day. For Premium accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits
per month.
So try doing the same thing again today but check your last day being Monday. When you check again next week the numbers should be correct.
We've noticed lately that as our site is growing, our data in Google Analytics is getting less reliable.
One of the places we've noticed this most strongly is on the "Realtime Dashboard".
When we were getting 30k users per day, it would show about 500-600 people on line at a time. Now that we are hitting 50k users per day, it's showing 200-300 people on line at a time.
(Other custom metrics from within our product show that the user behavior hasn't changed much; if anything, users are currently spending longer on the site than ever!)
The daily totals in analytics are still rising, so it's not like it's just missing the hits or something... Does anyone have any thoughts?
The only thing I can think of is that there is probably a difference in interpretation of what constitutes a user being on line.
How do you determine if the user is on line?
Unless there is an explicit login/logout tracking, is it possible that it assumes that a user has gone if there is no user generated event or a request from the browser within an interval of X seconds?
If that is the case then it may be worth while adding a hidden iframe with some Javascript code that keeps sending a request every t seconds.
You can't compare instant measures of unique, concurrent users to different time-slices of unique users.
For example, you could have a small number of concurrent unique users (say 10) and a much higher daily unique users number like 1000, because 1000 different people were there over the course of the day, but only 10 at any given time. The number of concurrent users isn't correlated to the total daily uniques, the distribution over the course of the day may be uneven and it's almost apples and oranges.
This is the same way that monthly unique and daily uniques can't be combined, but average daily uniques are a lower bound for monthly uniques.
I wonder how is "Visit Duration" calculated. If it counts split time between clicks on a site.
Because I have a website composed of index only (with some slideshow etc.).
Is GA tool able to calculate real visit duration time or not?
Thanks a lot.
Sorry for my english if there are mistakes
edited:
Is there some way how to do reload (simulating of pageview) on a background?
From Google:
Google Analytics determines visit duration by tracking the elapsed time between pageviews. The last page of a visit is not recorded since there is no subsequent pageview.
Also see Visit Duration, Avg