Written by Fernando Maciá
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Last Friday, August 12, Google officially announced a change in the way browsing sessions are recorded in Google Analytics.
Changes in the way visits and sessions are measured
Until that day, a user’s browsing session ended when the user spent more than 30 minutes in an idle state, that is, without interacting with the Web page, at the end of the day or when the browser was closed. If after any of these three circumstances the user visited the same website again, Google Analytics counted this visit as a new browsing session, i.e. a new visit. If the user revisited the page within 30 minutes from another traffic source, Google attributed the original visit to the last source.
With the change implemented on August 12, a user’s session ends when more than 30 minutes elapse between two pages viewed by the visitor, at the end of the day or when any of the traffic source data (collected in the utm parameters of the cookie) changes. If any of these events occur, the next page view creates a new session (or visit), but no longer when the user closes the browser. That is, now, if the user makes a second visit from a different traffic source correctly tagged, Google counts two visits with two different traffic origins.
Implementation problems
The update produced a number of unexpected effects in the recording of certain parameters. For several days, the data displayed by various Google Analytics dashboards, advanced segmentations, etc. was very unreliable.
Google applied a patch to this update on August 17. These errors did not affect all websites, but it is very likely that you will notice strange data in the average session time (very low values), bounce rate (higher values), percentage of new visits (lower values) and average number of pages per visit (lower values) between August 12 and 17. These values tend to normalize as of August 18.
How can the change in Google Analytics measurement mode affect you?
In principle, the sources of each visit should be better reflected. For example:
Scenario:
A user visits your website through a natural result on Google. 20 minutes later he receives a newsletter and clicks on a link.
Before:
Google Analytics counted a single visit coming from the newsletter (Google always attributed the traffic source to the last click) although the keyword origin of the visit was counted as SEO traffic source (although with 0 visits).
Now:
Google Analytics counts two visits: one coming from an organic result on Google (the keyword will be counted as the origin of a visit) and another visit coming from the link in the newsletter.
Attention, for this implementation to work correctly, it is very important to tag correctly (utm’s parameters) all the links in AdWords, Newsletters, social networks, etc. otherwise the traffic source information will NOT be updated correctly.
How does it affect the data in the reports?
The expected changes in the reports are:
- Increase in the number of visits (not in the number of unique visitors).
- The increase in the number of visits will affect the related quality data: time, page view and conversion rate averages decrease, and the bounce rate increases.
- Visit frequency and user loyalty reports are now much more descriptive of reality (the percentage of segment 1 visit decreases).
- Data is being updated in Google Analytics more slowly than before, you have to wait more hours to have the previous day’s data “closed”.
- It is recommended to upgrade to the latest version of the Google Analytics interface.
- In principle, it does not seem necessary to update anything in the implemented footprints.
This update of Google Analytics does NOT mean a real change in the behavior of your Web traffic, but a change in the way of interpreting and analyzing this traffic, so in most cases we will have to wait for a history to be able to establish valid comparative references in the evolution of the quantitative and qualitative traffic parameters that we usually collect in our reports.
