Glossary

Avg. Session Duration (GA4)

Average session duration is the mean time visitors spent on your site per session. It approximates depth of interest: longer sessions usually mean content that holds attention. For ad traffic, it shows whether clicks brought people who actually wanted to be there.

How to read it

Judge it against the page's job: 30 seconds is fine for a lead form, poor for a comparison guide. Segment by source to spot campaigns sending window-shoppers.

Where it misleads

Averages hide the split between quick bounces and deep readers, and the last page of a session often contributes no measured time. Directional metric, not a stopwatch.

Related terms

Engagement Rate (GA4) →

Engagement rate is the share of sessions that were 'engaged': lasted over 10 seconds, had a key event, or included at least two page views. It's GA4's inverse of the old bounce rate: it measures how many visits showed any real interaction.

Sessions (GA4) →

A session is one visit to your website: it starts when a user arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. One user can have many sessions. Sessions measure visit volume, the standard unit for 'how much traffic did the campaign send?'.

Page Views (GA4) →

Page views count every time a page on your site is loaded or reloaded. They measure raw content consumption: which pages get seen, how deep visitors go. Divided by sessions, they show how many pages a typical visit covers.

Metrics explained are nice. Metrics watched are better.

HeyMetrix monitors all of these across Google and Meta, with alerts and a nightly AI briefing.

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