Demand and conversion
Session, user, event
The three units analytics counts in, each measuring something different and none of them a person.
An event is one recorded action. A session is a group of events from one browser with a timeout between them — thirty minutes of inactivity by convention, which means a person reading a long page can start a second session without going anywhere. A user is a browser identifier, so one human on a phone, a laptop and a private window is three users, and a shared family tablet is one user who is several people.
GA4 counts in events, and its “users” are still identifiers rather than people. Any metric quoted per user is quoted per browser unless the business has logged-in identity stitched in, which most do not.
Deduplication across devices does not happen by default, so a “14,000 monthly users” figure typically describes eight or nine thousand humans. Where the number is used to size a market or a budget, say which unit it is in.
Definitions of the unit. Nothing here is calculated, and almost every argument about a marketing number is really an argument about one of these.
Is an input to
- Conversion rate
- The share of a defined population that completed a defined action — meaningless until both the population and the action are stated.
- Bounce rate and engagement rate
- Two mirror metrics for whether a visit went anywhere — and the definition changed underneath everyone when analytics moved to GA4.
An error in this figure does not stay in it. It reaches two numbers above it, and each of those is quoted as though it were measured.
Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.
- Testing a growth number you were given
- “Conversion is up 6.4×. Revenue grew 40%. Abandoned carts down 65%.” · 30 minutes, 5 questions.
A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.
- CRM, websites and omnichannel
- One customer, one record. Every metric downstream depends on it.
- Intelligence and decision layers
- A metric with two definitions has none.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.