You might have looked at your Behavior > New vs Returning users report in Google Analytics (GA) at some point and noticed some odd discrepancies in the numbers (see visual below).
Some immediate questions come to mind here:
- Why don’t the total number of New Visitors and Returning Visitors add up to overall Users?
- Why are there different terms for New Visitors and New Users?
- Why is the number of New Visitors different from the number of New Users?
Users vs Visitors
First thing to clarify is a Visitor vs a User:
Users (#1): Unique count of the total number of people that came to your site.*
Visitors (#3 & #4): User-level label that is applied to the person that came to your site. Any returning visitor was also a new visitor and does not lose the “new visitor” label just because the “returning visitor” one was added.
New and returning visitors are not mutually exclusive numbers, meaning that there is overlap between the two groups. If you came in as a new user during the time period being looked at, and later came back as a returning user in that same time period, then you’d appear in both the New Visitor and Returning Visitor counts. Therefore, when you sum up #3 and #4 in our visual, they don’t equal #1. That #1 is showing overall Users, with no duplicative statuses – so truly the unique count of users that came to your site during that time period.
New Users vs New Visitors
New User: The session-level status of a user who has never visited the site before. You can appear as a new user twice over the course of two sessions.
New Visitor: The user-level status of a user who has never visited the site before. You can only appear as a new visitor once.
A New User, meaning #2 and #5 in our visual, is the number of times a session was started with a user who had never visited the site before. But the question remains, why is the number of New Visitors (#3) different from the number of New Users (#2 and #5)?
This relates to the fact that GA automatically breaks and restarts sessions at midnight.
The breaking of sessions at midnight is a debatable choice by Google, but it exists nonetheless. If a new user is on the site at 11:50 PM, GA assigns a unique client ID cookie to them (ID: 123). This user is recognized in GA as a new visitor and a new user. 10 minutes later, the session breaks at midnight, and a new session is started on Day 2.
GA sees the same client ID (ID: 123) and knows this is the same new user from before, despite a new session being force-started.
GA attributes this post-midnight session as having a new user again since they technically aren’t a returning visitor, meaning we now have 2 sessions and 2 new user counts – one of each for both days.
However, they only count as one new visitor since “visitor” references the user-level status of the visitor, while “new user” relates to the session-level. So our Day 2 new user, no matter what site actions they take, is a new visitor and can only be counted once as such – i.e., if a user comes back as a new user multiple times (which seems illogical but is what happens in the case we’re discussing), they only are counted as a new visitor once, and if they come back as a returning user multiple times (this at least makes sense), they are only counted as a returning visitor once.
Knowing that new users actually relates to the session count, we understand why #2 in our visual is equal to #6 with the total count of new user sessions.
The new and returning user sessions, #6 and #7, total up to the overall number of sessions, #8, as expected (so #6 + #7 = #8).
How to Accurately Calculate New vs Returning Users
Now that we know all of this, how do you actually calculate the number of new vs returning users? You can do this by using the following formulas:
- Returning Users = Returning Visitors
- New Users = Overall Users – Returning Visitors
OR if you refer to our visual:
- Returning Users = #4
- New Users = #1 – #4
For more information on GA idiosyncrasies, read on to the Seer Blog or subscribe to our newsletter below!
Home » Users vs. Sessions: What’s the difference?
by Carli Hanlon
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools for monitoring and analyzing your web data. You can learn a lot about who is visiting your site — if you know the lingo. So let’s start with some of the basics: What’s the difference between users and sessions?
Defining Users in Google Analytics
In Google Analytics-ese, Users means the number of unique visitors to your site. Essentially, these are the actual people landing on your website, which means that if someone were to visit your site 100 times on the same device or browser, they would still only count as one user. Google Analytics counts these repeat customers as Returning Users.
Here’s where it gets tricky: One person can still count as multiple users in the right circumstances: If a user visits your site, deletes their browser cookies, and returns to your site afterwards, they are counted as a New User. The same will happen if a user switches devices or browsers on a return visit to your site.
New Users are counted each time a device (laptop, phone, tablet etc) or browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) loads your content for the first time.
Defining Sessions in Google Analytics
Sessions in Google Analytics are defined as the total number of visits to your site — including both new and repeat visits. So that same person who visited your site 100 times on the same device is counted as one user, but 100 sessions. However, if that person visited 3 pages on your site in each of those 100 sessions, while this would count as 300 Pageviews (the number of pages viewed on one website), it would still only be 100 sessions.
A new session in Google Analytics starts after 30 minutes of inactivity, or at midnight — so if a user opens your website, walks away from their computer for 45 minutes, and returns to the page after that, it counts as 2 sessions. Likewise, if a user logs onto your site at 11:59pm and leaves at 12:01am, that’s another 2 sessions.
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Users vs. Sessions in Google Analytics
The easiest way to remember the difference is to think of bacon.
This is going somewhere, we promise…
Consider the user a person, the sessions the meals a person has in a day, and the pageviews the components of each of those meals. If you have eggs, bacon, coffee, and toast for breakfast, that correlation in Google Analytics is one user (you), one session (breakfast), and 4 pageviews (eggs, coffee, toast, and — yes — bacon). If you had a salad and iced tea for lunch, that would still be the same user, with a new session and two pageviews. Let’s say you decided to have breakfast for dinner — eggs, bacon, and pancakes. Because this is a new meal (session), even though you already had eggs and bacon once that day, they would still count as new pageviews because they occurred in dinner versus breakfast.
Simple? Yes. And almost as tasty.
Where to find Users and Sessions — and what to do next
But where do you find these metrics in Google Analytics?
Click on the Audience Report, then click Overview. Here, you can see a list of important metrics including Users, New Users, and Sessions.
Although they appear in the same area and can often display similar numbers, you can see now what the differences are.
Now that you know the basics, we can move on to when to use each of these metrics and how they can help your nonprofit better understand its audiences and site traffic. Let’s start with the Users and New Users metrics. To differentiate between New Users and Returning Users, go to the Audience tab, click on Behavior, then click the New vs. Returning report. Here, you can see which users are new and which are returning, the bounce rate and session duration for each group, and more.
After your organization runs a paid advertising campaign or boosts a social media post to raise awareness beyond your core group of supporters, the new users metric compared against Source and Medium is helpful in indicating how successful these efforts were at bringing in new users.
The returning users metric can indicate how loyal users are, and whether your site has content that engages them over multiple sessions. You’ll want to increase both new and returning users over time to make sure you’re leveraging impact and driving in more conversions at each level of the funnel of engagement.
Now let’s talk about sessions: Looking at the sessions metric is a good way to gauge how your site is doing overall. An increase in sessions can be another indicator of quality growth for your website if those sessions are resulting in more goal and event conversions for your organization.
The sessions metric can be useful when used against goal and event conversions to see if users are getting caught in one stage of the funnel. For example, if your sessions increased by 200% year-over-year, but your goal conversion rate has remained the same, this may be indicative that either a key landing page is not getting the right traffic or something isn’t functioning as it should, such as an email sign-up form or donation link.
Becoming fluent in Google may seem overwhelming, but have no fear! This is just one of the resources we have on Google Analytics lingo along with other analytics topics. You’ll be a master in no time. You can even take it a step further with our course on Google Analytics, produced in partnership with our friends at TechSoup.
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