Difference Between Sessions and Cookies
Understanding Google Analytics Cookies
Whenever a user accesses a website, a cookie is added to the browser. It is a small bit of information that gets stored on a user’s computer. These cookies are browser specific. This means that Chrome and Firefox will not be able to access each other’s cookies. Additionally, these are also site-specific, which means that a particular website will not be able to view the cookies that you have saved on other websites.
Furthermore, cookies help businesses gain a better understanding of who their customers are, how they behave on the website, which content was viewed and so on. These are valuable insights to further enhance your website or app to generate more leads or sales.
Understanding Google Analytics Sessions
As mentioned above, when a user arrives at your website, the browser stores a small amount of data via cookies. These cookies allow Google Analytics to identify users for the duration of a session given that the user is using the same browser and device.
A session is defined as a group of activities a user takes on your website within a given time frame. Google Analytics defaults that time frame to 30 minutes. These interactions may include browsing of pages, downloading resources, purchasing products and more. It means that whatever a user does on your website before they leave equals one session.
Moreover, high session duration is important for both PPC advertising and SEO as one of the ways the search engines algorithms judges a website’s value by the time users spend on a website. This means that the longer time users spend on your site, the higher your site may rank in Google Search results.
You should now have a better understanding of Google Analytics cookies and sessions. If you want to be able to analyze your Google Analytics data, you have to understand what the variables of this tool mean and the significant differences of these values.
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