A session is a single visit to your website that begins when a visitor arrives and ends after a period of inactivity, at midnight, or when they leave. It includes all pageviews, clicks, and events during that visit. Sessions measure traffic volume rather than unique people, which makes them a core foundation for ecommerce analytics.
Sessions are the baseline for understanding whether your marketing actually brings people to the store. They help you see the effect of campaigns, promotions, PR, and seasonality on visit volume. When sessions rise while conversion rate and average order value also improve, you are scaling with quality traffic. If sessions spike but revenue per visitor falls, targeting or landing pages likely need work. Monitoring sessions by device can expose mobile-specific friction that hides in aggregate views. Over time, steady organic session growth signals brand strength and healthier unit economics.
Analytics platforms create a session when a visitor lands on a page, then close it after 30 minutes of inactivity, at midnight, or when the traffic source changes. One person can generate multiple sessions in a day, for example a research visit followed by a purchase later. Some tools define timeouts or source resets differently, so confirm platform rules before comparing teams or dashboards. Single-page apps may require manual events to keep session timing accurate. Bot filters and internal IP exclusions are important to protect signal quality.
A DTC apparel brand launches a two-day flash sale across email and paid social. Sessions climb from 4,000 to 9,500 during the window, which confirms reach. The team segments sessions by channel and device, then checks revenue per visitor and checkout completion. Paid social delivers most of the new sessions, but email has higher efficiency, so budget shifts toward the next email push. After the event, sessions settle above the prior baseline, indicating some lasting awareness gains.
Sessions are not unique visitors, which count people rather than visits. Sessions are not pageviews either, because one visit can include many page loads. Treating session growth as audience growth can inflate forecasts. Sessions alone are not a quality signal, so they must be paired with conversion and revenue metrics to guide decisions.
Might as well give us a shot, right? It'll change the way you approach CRO. We promise. In fact, our friend Nate over at Original Grain used element-level revenue data from heatmap to identify high-impact areas of his website to test, resulting in a 17% lift in Revenue per Session while scaling site traffic by 43%. Be like Nate. Try heatmap today.