GA4 Average Session Duration and Views per Session: Two New Metrics

Google is adding two new metrics to GA4 properties, including GA4 average session duration, that marketers can use to build custom reports.

Google Analytics is adding two metrics to GA4 properties, views per session and average session duration, giving you a clearer picture of how many pages visitors view and how long their visits last.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Keeps Getting More Precise

New in GA4 as of late November 2022: views per session and average session duration are now available in Explorations and report customization.

Views per session shows how many app screens or web pages users view during a single visit, while average session duration measures how much time users spend on the website.

In her announcement on Twitter, Carly Boddy, a product manager at Google Analytics, showed how to add these metrics when building custom reports.

If you’ve been tracking views per session and average session duration in Universal Analytics (UA) properties, there are a few key differences to know about in GA4.

In particular, you’re likely to see different session counts, and the gap can vary from one account to another depending on the following factors:

• Geography: UA properties start a new session at midnight even if the user hasn’t left, which means session counts can be higher than in GA4. Consider your users’ time zones and how likely they are to be active across midnight, which triggers a new session.
• UTM tagging: UTM tags on internal links reset the session in UA, so you may see far more sessions in UA than in GA4.
• Filters: UA report data may be subject to view filters that exclude data. For GA360 customers, GA4 report data may be subject to filters that determine which data from a source property appears in a subproperty.
• Estimation: GA4 properties estimate the number of sessions on your website or app from the number of unique session IDs, while UA properties don’t estimate session counts. GA4 counts sessions more efficiently, with high accuracy and a low error rate.

Google Analytics and its new GA4 model keep evolving well after launch, as Google said they would. Our team follows these changes closely so we stay on top of every GA4 update.

Where Things Stand in 2026

Standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data on July 1, 2023, and Universal Analytics 360 properties followed on July 1, 2024 (here’s why migrating to GA4 mattered). GA4 is now the only version of Google Analytics, so these session metrics are part of everyday reporting, for example when you check whether your SEO is still working. To go further, see our guides to GA4 attribution models and Google Ads conversion tracking.

Feeling lost in GA4? Référenceur is a French-speaking agency from Belgium and Luxembourg whose web analytics team works with U.S. businesses remotely, through video calls, shared screens, and monthly reporting. Get a free assessment of your analytics setup.