How To Find Pages Per Session in GA4
What Is Pages Per Session?
In Google Analytics, pages per session metric is a measure of user engagement that indicates the average number of pages viewed by a user during a session on your website.
Although Google Analytics 4 does not have a direct replacement for the pages per session metric, it still offers valuable data and similar metrics to understand user engagement on your website.
Although Universal Analytics (UA) did offer the metric of pages/session, GA4 introduces an alternative term known as views per session.
The number of pages per session is important for measuring how well your website is able to attract and hold the attention of your audience.
Analyzing the pages per session or average pages per session can provide valuable insights to improve the user experience and increase overall engagement.
User Engagement Metrics in GA4
In GA4, the focus has shifted towards user engagement during a visit rather than simply tracking the number of page views. This means that new approaches and terms have been introduced to better measure and understand user engagement.
Some analytics metrics, like views per session and pages per session, are often used interchangeably.
Let's look at currently available GA4 metrics alternative to pages per session:
How To Find Pages Per Session in GA4?
While GA4's default standard reports may not display most of these metrics, you can easily generate an exploration report and include various values. The views per session metric closely resembles the pages per session metric.
To track user engagement and session data in Google Analytics 4, follow the steps below:
Step 1: Go to the Explore section in your Google Analytics 4 account, then click the blank template to create a new exploration.
Step 2: To add metrics, click the plus sign. Find Views per session and check the box. Then, click Import. In the same way, you can add multiple metrics, such as average engagement time per session.
Step 3: Now, click the plus sign next to Dimensions. Find the following dimensions, check the boxes next to them, and import them into your report:
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You can pick other dimensions that are important to your business.
Step 4: Move the dimensions to Rows. After that, move the metric "Views per session" to Values. You can move values by double-clicking on them or dragging them.
If you follow these steps correctly, you'll be able to see the number of views per session ( pages per session) as shown below.
How Do You Calculate Pages Per Session?
To begin, you must first comprehend how GA4 defines a session. Google Analytics defines a session as the amount of time a user or visitor spends interacting with your website.
Here is a detailed guide to GA4 sessions, how they work, and so on.
Pages/session is calculated using the following formula:
Pages per session = the total number of page views / the total number of sessions.
For example, a user will usually view two pages before ending their session if the average is two pages per session in GA4.
To gain a better understanding, imagine a situation where a user goes to your website and navigates through four different pages. The pages per session value for that user in this case is 4. On the other hand, if a user only views one page during their visit, the page per session value would be 1.
Tip: GA4 also takes into account repeated views, so if your viewer clicks the back button to read something again, it contributes to the total number of views.
Why Should You Track Views Per Session?
The number of pages viewed on your website per session is a reliable indicator of content engagement and the quality of the visitor experience.
You are now aware of the meaning of pages per session and alternative values for monitoring it in GA4.
Since new GA4 terms have been introduced to measure user engagement, you need to use views per session metric in addition to other engagement metrics in order to track pages per session.?
Should you be interested in further reading, the following additional articles might be beneficial to understanding user behavior with GA4:
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10 个月This is a great how-to! I cannot figure out how to get the report to populate though... I've followed all the steps, but it says no data available. Help?