What is Sessions?

A session groups everything one visitor does in a single sitting: the pages they load, the buttons they click, the forms they submit. It starts when they arrive and ends when they are done.

The tricky part is how it ends. Analytics tools close a session after a stretch of inactivity, commonly thirty minutes. Walk away for lunch and come back, and one visit gets recorded as two. Arriving again from a different source can also start a fresh session.

Because of those rules, sessions sit between page views and unique visitors. More than the people, fewer than the page loads. Say which one you mean whenever you report a number.