# Sessions vs Pages in Google Analytics

When you start working with Google Analytics, in particular when exporting the data and analysing in your own tools, it is important to understand the difference between 'sessions' and 'pages'. Note that the identifiers used below are related to our experience with User Analytics properties (more details here) which will be retired in late 2023 but the theory is applicable for Google Analytics 4.

# Sessions

A user can come to your website and browse through several pages. Lets say you have a website selling shoes. The user flow could look like this:

• User searches in Google for 'Mens Shoes size 11' and clicks through to 'www.bestshoes.com/mens/size-11'
• User looks at the listings and clicks on a shoe for more details 'www.bestshoes.com/mens/model-c/'
• User adds shoe to basket and goes to purchase 'www.bestshoes.com/payment'
• User exits

When the user lands on your website they will have a unique 'visitId'. Google will also check if the user has an existing cookie to see whether there is an existing 'fullVisitorId' or if a new one is created. Note that the 'visitId' is only unique for this user and may be a duplicate across many users. The whole user flow above is counted as one 'session' and can be uniquely identified as a combination of both 'visitId' and 'fullVisitorId'.

# Pages

A page view occurs when a user loads a url within a session. So in the example above we have a single session with 3 page views:

• 'www.bestshoes.com/mens/size-11'
• 'www.bestshoes.com/mens/model-c/'
• 'www.bestshoes.com/payment'

If you are accessing the Google analytics data via a bigquery export, all page views are contained within a single row for each session. You have to unnest the data to calculate metrics on a page level. Also note that with a page you also have 'event'/ 'hit' level data, which are actions the user triggers with a page. You can read more on unnesting Google Bigquery data here.