Sessions vs Visits

Sessions and visits are often used interchangeably in web analytics, but they have distinct characteristics. A session typically refers to a group of user interactions with your website within a specific time frame, usually ending after 30 minutes of inactivity, whereas a visit traditionally represents a single instance of a user coming to your website. Sessions are more commonly used in modern analytics platforms like Google Analytics and capture multiple page views, events, and interactions within one active period, while measuring unique behaviours. Visits, on the other hand, are a somewhat older metric that simply counts each time someone accesses your site, regardless of what they do once there.

When analysing the effectiveness of a content marketing campaign, sessions would be the preferred metric as they provide deeper insights into user engagement and behaviour. For example, if you're evaluating how users navigate through your blog content, sessions would show you not only how many times users accessed your site but also how they moved between articles, how long they stayed, and what actions they took before leaving—giving you a more comprehensive understanding of content performance. Visits would merely tell you how many times your site was accessed, which might be sufficient for basic traffic reporting but lacks the contextual information needed for optimisation decisions.

Sessions

Website Visits

What is it?

A Session, sometimes called a Visit, is the set of interactions, or web requests, made within a given time frame by a single user visiting a specific website. A single Session often contains multiple activities, such as page views, events, or transactions. In web analytics, a session is either capped by exiting the website or by a period of user inactivity.

Website Visits, also referred to as sessions, track the number of times users interact with your website during distinct periods of engagement. Each visit, or session, represents a continuous interaction that begins when a user arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or when they leave the site.

Who is it for?

Marketing Manager

Marketing Automation Specialist

Marketing Manager

SEO Specialist

Digital Marketing Manager

Chief Marketing Officer

Formula

ƒ Count(Sessions)

ƒ Count(Website Visits)

Example

A small-scale online furniture retailer enjoys success selling furniture through their website. They hold an end-of-year sale and see a spike in interest, which results in their website having 5,000 sessions in one week and 4,500 sessions the next week. The website's Sessions count for those two weeks is 9,500.

Let's say you're running a campaign for a new product launch: Day 1: 1,000 users visit your site, generating 1,200 visits/sessions (some users returned within the day after timeout periods) Day 2: 800 users visit, generating 950 visits/sessions Day 3: 1,200 users visit, generating 1,400 visits/sessions Your total visits for the three-day period would be 3,550, even though your unique users/visitors might only total 2,500 (accounting for overlap between days). This difference shows you the level of repeat engagement your campaign is driving—the same people are coming back multiple times.