How to Find Sessions in Google Analytics

Trying to find the total number of sessions on your website is one of the most fundamental tasks in Google Analytics, yet it can feel surprisingly hidden. This guide will show you exactly where to find the sessions metric in Google Analytics 4, how to use it in your reports, and why it’s so important for understanding your audience engagement.

What is a Session in Google Analytics 4?

Before analyzing any number, it's always worth knowing exactly what it is. In Google Analytics 4, a session is a group of interactions a user has with your website within a specific time frame. A new session starts when a user opens your website or app.

Every session has a unique ID, and it automatically times out after 30 minutes of inactivity. For instance, if someone visits your homepage, reads a blog post, and then leaves the tab open without doing anything for 31 minutes, GA4 considers the session over. If they come back and click another link after this period, a brand-new session begins.

This is a subtle but important shift from the old Universal Analytics (UA). In UA, a session would automatically reset at midnight. In GA4, if someone starts browsing your site at 11:55 PM and continues until 12:05 AM, it all counts as a single session. This change provides a more accurate picture of continuous user engagement.

The 30-minute inactivity timeout is adjustable. You can change this setting by going to Admin > Data Streams > (Select your stream) > Configure tag settings > Show more > Adjust session timeout. For a blog, 30 minutes might be perfect. But for a video streaming site where a user might be idle while watching a long video, extending this timeout might make more sense.

Why Sessions Are a Critical Metric for Your Business

Sessions aren’t just a raw traffic number, they represent opportunities to engage, convert, and build relationships with your visitors. Think of each session as a chance to make an impression.

• Measure marketing campaign success: One of the quickest ways to see if a new ad campaign or social media push is working is a spike in sessions. You can tag your campaign URLs with UTM parameters to see exactly how many sessions each specific campaign is driving.
• Gauge user engagement: Are people sticking around? A high number of sessions combined with a high engagement rate (another GA4 metric meaning the user spent at least 10 seconds, had a conversion, or viewed 2+ pages) tells you your content is resonating.
• Understand traffic volume: Sessions give you a reliable pulse on your overall website traffic. Monitoring trends in session volume helps you understand your site's health and growth over time. Is your weekly session count growing, declining, or flat? The answer has serious implications for your business goals.

How to Find Sessions in Standard GA4 Reports

For a quick, high-level overview, the standard reports in Google Analytics are the fastest place to find your session data. Here’s the most common report you’ll use:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account: Navigate to your GA4 property.
2. Go to the Reports Section: In the left-hand navigation menu, click on the "Reports" icon (it looks like a little bar chart).
3. Navigate to Traffic Acquisition: Under the "Lifecycle" dropdown, open the "Acquisition" menu and click on "Traffic acquisition."

You’re now looking at the Traffic acquisition: Session default channel group report. By default, you’ll see a table with "Session default channel group" as the primary dimension.

Find the "Sessions" column in the table. This column shows you the total number of sessions for each channel grouping (like Organic Search, Direct, Paid Search, Referral, etc.) in the selected date range. You can easily see which channels are driving the most traffic to your site.

Pro Tip: Click the small dropdown arrow next to "Session default channel group" at the top of the table. You can change this primary dimension to get a different view of your session data. Some popular options include:

• Session source / medium: See exactly where traffic came from (e.g., "google / organic", "facebook.com / referral").
• Session campaign: See session data organized by the marketing campaigns you've tagged with UTM parameters. This is incredibly useful for measuring ROI.

Drilling Deeper: Building a Custom Report with Sessions

Standard reports are great for quick overviews, but what if you want to answer more specific questions like, "How many sessions from our Summer Sale email campaign happened on mobile devices and resulted in a purchase?" This is where GA4's "Explore" reports come in.

You can use the Explore section to build custom reports from scratch, giving you full control over the dimensions and metrics you want to analyze.

Let's build a simple report showing sessions and revenue by campaign.

Step 1: Create a New Exploration

• In the left-hand navigation, click the "Explore" icon.
• Click on "Blank report" or "Free-form" to start a new exploration.

You'll see a three-panel interface. On the left is the Variables panel where you add your dimensions and metrics. In the middle is the Tab Settings panel where you drag and drop from the variables panel to build your report. On the right is the actual report canvas, which will populate as you configure your settings.

Step 2: Add Dimensions and Metrics

First, we need to tell GA4 which building blocks we want to use. We'll import some dimensions and metrics into our report builder.

1. Add Dimensions: Under the "Dimensions" section in the Variables panel, click the "+" sign. Search for and select the following, then click "Import":
2. Add Metrics: Now, do the same under the "Metrics" section. Click the "+" sign, search for and select these, then click "Import":

Step 3: Build Your Report in the Tab Settings

Now that you've got your Lego bricks, it's time to build something. Drag and drop the dimensions and metrics you just imported from the Variables panel into the Tab Settings panel:

• Drag Session campaign from "Dimensions" into the "Rows" box.
• You can optionally drag Device category into the "Columns" box to get a breakdown by desktop, mobile, and tablet.
• Drag Sessions, Conversions, and Total revenue from "Metrics" into the "Values" box.

Instantly, the canvas on the right will update. You now have a custom report showing every campaign, the number of sessions, conversions, and revenue it generated, broken down by device. This deep dive helps you find real, actionable insights into what's driving your business forward.

Sessions vs. Users vs. Views: What's the Difference?

Understanding the distinction between these three "cousin" metrics is crucial for accurate analysis. They're often confused, but each tells a different part of the story.

A Simple Library Analogy

Imagine your website is a library:

• Users: This is a unique person - someone with a library card. This person is John Smith. GA4 identifies a unique user through browser cookies or, if you've enabled it, User-ID.
• Sessions: This is a single visit to the library. John might visit the library on Monday to check out a book. That's one session. He might return on Thursday to use the computer. That's a second session. So we have one user, but two sessions.
• Views: This is the total number of pages visited. In GA4, "Views" is the new term for "Pageviews." On Monday, John looked at the mystery section, the sci-fi section, and the new arrivals shelf before checking out. That’s three Views within a single session.

So, one user can have multiple sessions, and one session can have multiple views. They're all related, but they measure distinct aspects of engagement.

When to Use Each Metric

• Use Users to understand the size of your unique audience or customer base.
• Use Sessions to measure overall traffic volume and engagement for a specific period.
• Use Views to understand which specific pages on your site are the most popular.

Final Thoughts

Finding "Sessions" in Google Analytics 4 is straightforward once you know where to look. You can use standard reports like Traffic Acquisition for a quick glimpse, or dive deep into the Explore section to build detailed reports that slice your session data by campaign, device, or countless other dimensions.

The real power of GA4 lies in this flexibility, allowing you to move beyond basic traffic counts and truly understand how users interact with your site. At Graphed, we’ve found that the biggest hurdle in data analysis isn't the data itself, but the steps required to get to it. Instead of clicking through menus and configuring reports in GA4, we allow you to simply ask a question like, “Show me sessions and revenue by campaign this month,” and get a visualization instantly. We built it to remove the friction between your question and a valuable, data-backed answer.