By going step-by-step through this intro to web analytics, you'll learn how to interpret the numbers you see in Yandex.Metrica reports.

In this lesson, we'll look at three key terms: pageview, session, and user.

Every time a user opens a page on a website that uses Yandex.Metrica, a pageview event is registered on Yandex.Metrica servers. Multiple pageviews from the same user are combined into one session in Yandex.Metrica. Sessions provide the basic data for building reports.

A session starts when a user lands on the website from an external source. Users might click a link on a third-party website, an ad, a search engine result, or social media page. Users can also land on your website by clicking a bookmark or typing a URL in the browser address bar (these are called direct clicks).

A session ends when no new events are registered from the user for some time (30 minutes by default). If the same user lands again from an external source within 30 minutes since the last event, Yandex.Metrica doesn’t consider this a new session: all new pageviews are added to the previous session.

Example

If a user lands on your website from a search engine, views one page for 25 minutes, then opens another page, then immediately leaves to come back in 20 minutes using a social media link, all those pageviews are combined into one 45-minute session with the source “Search engine traffic”.

Sessions from ad sources are counted in a different way. For every new ad click, regardless of the time elapsed since the user’s previous activity on your website, Yandex.Metrica always registers a new session.

Example

If the user came from a search engine and then within 30 minutes (that is, before the end of the session) clicked through to the website from an ad, then two sessions are saved for the reports. The first session includes all pageviews starting from the search result click and up until the ad click. The second session includes all pageviews starting from the ad click until the end of the session (when 30 minutes expires since their last interaction with your website).

However, both sessions are linked to the same unique user.

Each browser that accesses your website stores a unique identifier (cookie file). Yandex.Metrica uses this file to recognize users and tell them apart. Please keep in mind that the unique cookie identifier is assigned at the browser level. This means that if the same user opens a website from different browsers, — whether they are installed on the same or different computers, mobile phones, or tablets — Yandex.Metrica registers a new user for each new browser opened.

Yandex.Metrica saves general information about the user and their sessions. However, the session data is associated with the user, so Yandex.Metrica can show the first session, its source, the last session, and the total number of sessions and their frequency per user.

This way you can find out how users originally land on your website, how often they come back, evaluate effectiveness for different traffic sources, and make other conclusions. For example, if a significant percentage of users land on your website directly, your audience is quite loyal: your users remember your website address or open it from their bookmarks.