How Google Analytics Pulls Sessions and Image Referrals

Posted by Sanket Patel

August 30, 2011

Google 8 min read

News is buzzing that two remarkable changes are to be made by Google in its Analytics, which make a huge effect in your website. Firstly, now Google can include Image as a search traffic that is great advantage of the website owner. Now onwards, Session IDs are to be measured differently. Google and other analytics tools verify the behavior of user while they are reaching to your website. They also do analysis of new “session” of the user as well.  In each session, page views, time on site, and total visitor count are to be determined.

Google were using three different measures such as a session will be ended when user is taking approximate 30 minutes between page views for a single visitor, at the end of a day, at the time when user closes browsers, etc. From above measures, first one and second one will remain same but some changes occur that the session will end as user closes their browser. It is supposed by the Google that user may occur some kind of internet problem such as browser crash, “boss is coming” alt-F4 tactics, or casually browsing around a site at the time when you are busy in other activities.

Another measure is also added by the Google, i.e. if any visitor go away from the site and re enter in that site then it will be counted as a new session. It is research that total number of visits will be increased while other metrics such time on site, page views, etc. will be decreased. Now, Google’s organic search traffic is also adding traffic from images.google.com, this will give a great impact to your website. This is one of the good things as huge decrease in referral traffic has been seen although ratio of search traffic is high. It is depends on you whether you are considering this as a good thing or not.   Now, with the help of Google Image Search user will be able to know what search terms visitors came in on although the whole search traffic statistics and performance of site will be twisted.

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