Session Duration Tracking

GA4’s Average Session Duration is Lying to You Let me explain. If I told you the average salary in a room was $1 million… Would you believe everyone in that room is rich? Probably. BUT... Maybe 9 people make $20K, and one multi-millionaire skews the average. That’s exactly what’s happening with Average Session Duration **in GA4**. The Problem? GA4 Uses the Mean, Not the Median. 👉 Mean = "average" (adds all times, divides by sessions). 👉 Median = the middle value (what most users actually do). The difference? One long session can distort the entire number. Why This Screws Up Your Decisions Imagine 9 users spend 10 seconds on your site. And 1 person stays for 10 minutes. 🚨 GA4 reports an “Average Session Duration” of ~1 minute.** 🚨 But 90% of users actually left in 10 seconds. If you trust that number, you might think: ✅ “Our content is great!” ✅ “People love our site!” But in reality? Most visitors bounced. How to Fix This 🔹 Calculate the **Median** in BigQuery. 🔹 Segment by traffic source (email vs. paid ads vs. organic). 🔹 Track session drop-offs to see where people actually leave. Most brands trust GA4 blindly. But bad data leads to bad decisions - and lost revenue. Know of another metric that doesn’t make sense? DM me!

💥 This is one of the easiest ways to minimize (not set) issues in GA4, stop the inflation of the session count for the same user and stop skewing all the session-based metrics. 👇 By default, a GA4 session expires after 30 minutes of users' inactivity. You should change this setting by changing the session timeout settings in your GA4 property. You can make a session expire after 45 minutes of users' inactivity or after 7 hours of users' inactivity. However, a GA4 session timeout can not be less than 5 minutes or greater than 7 hours 55 minutes. Before you change the GA4 session timeout setting, you need to decide the ideal length of your GA4 session. For most websites, a GA4 session that is 7 hours and 55 minutes long is ideal. Most users work online by keeping multiple browser tabs open and constantly switching between various tabs in order to work. As a result, they take frequent breaks while visiting your website. So, they browse your website for a while and then switch to another tab to complete another task. Then, they return to your website to pick up where they left off, and then they switch to another tab. The default session timeout of 30 minutes does not reflect such browsing behaviour. You end up inflating the session count for the same user and skewing all the session-based metrics. If a user returns to your website multiple times within a few hours on the same day, all such user activities should be part of the same session; hence, GA4 should record only one session. You can accomplish this by using GA4's maximum session timeout, which is 7 hours 55 minutes basically, the entire working day. A session timeout of 30 minutes or less is not recommended unless your website automatically signs out a user after 30 minutes or less of inactivity. A GA4 session can start without a pageview or screenview, so you could end up with views or user engagements without sessions. This could result in (not set) appearing as the value of your 'Landing Page' dimension. When you use the maximum session timeout allowed by GA4, you can stop the GA4 session with pageview/screenview from expiring early, thus greatly reducing the chance of starting a new GA4 session without a pageview/screenview. I also like to use the maximum value allowed by GA4 for 'Adjust timer for engaged sessions', which is 60 seconds. So, a session would not be recorded as engaged until it is at least 60 seconds long. The default 10-second threshold for an engaged session does not make sense. After watching countless session recordings, the sessions that last for a few seconds are generally low-quality sessions. On a desktop device, an average website takes 8 to 10 seconds to load fully. On mobile, it could be even longer. You can't really do anything meaningful on a website in under 60 seconds. Maybe check the latest weather report on an app or check your bank balance.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗮 𝗨𝘀𝗲𝗿 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗟𝗮𝘀𝘁 — 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗜𝘁 𝗔𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲? In one project, the client pointed to GA4 reports: “Our average session is 5 minutes! People are reading the content.” So, the team discussed UI changes and ways to increase engagement. But when we analyzed sessions in detail, we found something else: many users had just left the tab open. No scrolls, no clicks - no activity. #GA4 doesn’t measure actual engagement - it follows technical rules: • Duration is based on time between events — not screen presence • A return after 31 minutes starts a new session, even if behavior is continuous • user_engagement can fire with minimal interaction This creates the illusion that users are engaged — when they might just be away from their screen. Because of this: • The client overestimated engagement • Invested in redesigning a landing page that was already fine • Spent on UI updates that didn’t improve conversions • Made decisions based on timers, not user behavior The metric looked good — but it measured time, not interest. Now I handle this differently: • Focus on REAL user_engagement_time and action intervals — not “session duration” • Check for real interaction events • Use proxy metrics: - scroll depth - time to first action - events per session • Manually audit high-"engagement" sessions in #BigQuery • Avoid using average session duration as a KPI - it’s often misleading GA4 gives you numbers. But understanding what they reflect — that’s your job. Session time isn’t how long someone stayed. It’s how long GA4 assumed they did. Want to get all my top Linkedin content? I regularly upload it to one Notion doc. Go here to download it for FREE: https://lnkd.in/gzhGSNni