Our buddies at Google Analytics are at it again! Busy, busy people and always thinking. So, if you haven’t yet noticed (or even logged in to GA, SHAME, you really need a business dashboard:), Google has changed the Google Analytics terminology of some key metrics in GA. Here’s a quick heads-up, and if we find more, we’ll letcha know:

1) “Visits” are now known as “Sessions”

This is important to understand. Short story? A session is group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example a single session can contain multiple pageviews, events, social interactions, custom variables, and ecommerce transactions. The default time frame is 30 minutes, although you can adjust this value. An excellent, more in-depth explanation from Google here.

2) “Visitors” web metric and “Active Users ” app metric are now known as “Users”.

So why the changes? Google feels it more accurately accounts for both web and app behavior, bringing it all into one place. Previously many metrics and dimensions used different terminology in app views and in Web views, despite reporting on the same data.

Although it may create some confusion at first, we feel it’s a great move and will ultimately make things much more clear and easy to articulate. And if you want to look at web and app metrics separately, you can set up a filter. Note: these changes apply to both Google Analytics Classic and Google Analytics Universal accounts.