When Will Google Analytics End a Session by Default?

Understanding when a visit to your website officially "ends" is fundamental to making sense of your Google Analytics data. Google groups all user interactions within a specific timeframe into a "session," but the rules for how that session concludes can be tricky. This article breaks down exactly when Google Analytics will end a session by default in both Google Analytics 4 and the older Universal Analytics (UA).

What is a Session in Google Analytics?

Think of a session as a single visit to your website. It’s the container that Google Analytics uses to group all the actions a user takes on your site within a continuous period of time. These actions, or "hits," can include viewing pages, clicking buttons, filling out forms, watching videos, or making a purchase.

An easy way to visualize this is to imagine a trip to the supermarket. Your "session" begins the moment you walk through the automatic doors. Everything you do inside - grabbing a cart, walking down the aisles, putting items in your cart, and checking out - is part of that single shopping trip. When you exit the store, your session is over.

In Google Analytics, this concept is crucial. Sessions are one of the most basic metrics for measuring user engagement. By analyzing session data, you can answer critical questions like:

• How many visits is my website getting?
• How long, on average, do users stay on my site per visit?
• Which marketing channels are driving the most visits?
• What percentage of visits result in a single page view (Bounce Rate)?

However, the value of these insights depends on the accuracy of your session count. If sessions end prematurely or run longer than they should, it can skew your data and lead to incorrect conclusions about user behavior. That's why understanding the default timeout rules is so important.

How Google Analytics 4 Ends a Session

Google Analytics 4 simplified the concept of a session. Since GA4 is built around an "event-based" model, its rules are more straightforward than its predecessor's. By default, a session in GA4 ends for one primary reason.

The 30-Minute Inactivity Rule

A session ends after 30 minutes of user inactivity. This is the main trigger for a session timeout in GA4.

But what counts as "activity"? In GA4, almost any user interaction that triggers an event will reset the 30-minute timer. This includes default triggered events like:

• page_view: A user lands on a new page.
• scroll: A user scrolls at least 90% down a page.
• click: A user clicks an outbound link.
• user_engagement: This event fires periodically when your website is in the user's active browser tab for more than a few seconds.

Any custom events you've configured, like add_to_cart or form_submit, also count as activity and will reset the timer.

Example in Action:

Imagine a user lands on one of your blog posts. They spend 10 minutes reading the article. During this time, they scroll down the page, triggering a scroll event. This resets the 30-minute timer. Then they get a phone call and leave the tab open in their browser without touching their computer.

If they come back 25 minutes later and click a link to another article, they are still within the same session because the inactivity period was less than 30 minutes. The timer resets again.

However, if they come back 35 minutes later and click a link, their original session has already timed out. Google Analytics will start a brand new session for this new activity.

What GA4 Doesn't Do Anymore

If you're used to the old Universal Analytics, two major changes in GA4 are critical to understand. By default, GA4 sessions DO NOT end in these two scenarios:

1. At Midnight: In GA4, a session can span across two days. If a user starts browsing your site at 11:45 PM and continues a flurry of activity past midnight into 12:15 AM, it all counts as a single, continuous session.
2. On a Campaign Change: A user can arrive from multiple sources within 30 minutes and remain in the same session. For instance, a user might click a Google Ad, browse a product page, then get a promotional email for that product, and click the link in the email to return to the product - all within 15 minutes. In GA4, this is all considered one session. This provides a much clearer view of the twisting path a customer takes before converting.

How to Adjust the Session Timeout in GA4

While 30 minutes is the default, you might have a good reason to change it. For example, if your site contains very long articles, complex configuration tools, or hour-long videos, users might be inactive for more than 30 minutes while still being engaged. In this case, extending the timeout is a good idea.

You can adjust this by navigating to:

Admin > Data Streams > [Select your stream] > Configure tag settings > Show all > Adjust session timeout.

Here, you can set the timer to be as short as 5 minutes or as long as 7 hours and 55 minutes.

How Universal Analytics (UA) Ended a Session

Even though Universal Analytics was officially sunsetted in July 2023, countless businesses still have years of historical data in UA. Understanding its session rules is essential for interpreting past performance and appreciating the changes made in GA4.

Universal Analytics had three distinct ways a session could end by default.

1. After 30 Minutes of Inactivity

Just like GA4, UA used a 30-minute inactivity timer. However, what counted as "activity" or a "hit" was more limited. Typically, this was restricted to a pageview, an event, or an e-commerce transaction. Just having a page open in an active tab was not enough - the user had to actively trigger one of these specific hits to reset the timer.

2. At Midnight

This is a classic UA rule that caused a lot of reporting confusion. Any session that was active when the clock struck midnight was automatically terminated and a new session was started. This was based on the timezone settings in your Analytics View.

Example of the midnight rule:

A customer is frantically doing some late-night holiday shopping. They start browsing your e-commerce site at 11:50 PM on December 23rd. They find the perfect gift, add it to their cart at 11:58 PM, and complete the purchase at 12:05 AM on December 24th.

In Universal Analytics, this single shopping trip would be recorded as two separate sessions:

• Session 1: Started at 11:50 PM with the source/medium that brought them there (e.g., google / cpc) and ended at 11:59:59 PM.
• Session 2: Started at 12:00 AM on the 24th with a source/medium of "direct / none" and would be assigned the purchase conversion.

This caused major attribution headaches, as it often gave credit to "Direct" traffic for a purchase that was actually driven by a paid ad just a few minutes earlier.

3. On a New Campaign Source

The last rule was another common source of inflated session counts. If a user arrived on your site, left, and then came back through a different marketing channel - all within the 30-minute time window - UA would start a new session.

What defines a "campaign source"? This includes traffic from sources tagged with UTM parameters, clicks from Google Ads, or referrals from other websites.

Example of the campaign change rule:

A user clicks on one of your Facebook Ads (tagged with utm_source=facebook) and lands on a product page. They browse for five minutes, looking at features and reviews. They decide to think about it and leave the tab open.

Ten minutes later, they go to their inbox, open your weekly newsletter, and click a link to the same product (tagged with utm_source=newsletter). Because the campaign source changed from "facebook" to "newsletter", Universal Analytics immediately ends the first session and begins a brand new one.

This behavior made it much harder to understand the role different channels played in a single user journey.

Why This Change Matters for Your Analysis

After comparing GA4 and UA, you'll likely notice your total session count is lower in GA4. This isn't a bad thing - it's actually more accurate. This accuracy has a direct impact on how you should interpret your data:

• Better Attribution: By not starting new sessions on campaign changes, GA4 gives you a much clearer picture of how your initial channels are performing. The source that originally acquired the user stays with them for their entire engaging visit.
• More Accurate Engagement Metrics: Fewer, more accurate sessions mean metrics like Average Session Duration and Pages per Session will naturally be higher in GA4. They now reflect a more complete picture of a user's visit.
• Rethinking E-commerce Analysis: The removal of the midnight rule cleans up conversion data dramatically. You no longer have conversions being mistakenly attributed to "Direct" traffic due to an arbitrary time cutoff.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, Google Analytics ends a session after 30 minutes of inactivity. But the specific in-session rules of GA4 versus Universal Analytics are quite different - GA4's modern approach avoids splitting a single journey into multiple sessions, providing a cleaner and more accurate view of user behavior.

We know that managing marketing and analytics data across countless platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify, and Salesforce can be overwhelming. As you dive deeper into these nuances, you spend more time wrestling with data and less time acting on it. At Graphed, we use AI to solve this. You can connect all your data sources in seconds and then simply ask questions in plain English - like "create a dashboard showing my top traffic-driving campaigns" or "what's our user engagement on mobile devices this month?" Graphed instantly builds the real-time dashboards for you, so you can focus on making decisions, not pulling reports.