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Average engagement time per session discrepancy

Posted on 07-08-2024 10:02 PM
mcole18
Bronze 1
Bronze 1
Reply posted on --/--/---- --:-- AM

Hi there, I'm creating a Looker Studio dashboard and want to include an average engagement time per session scorecard. Previous community posts suggest that you can achieve this by using user engagement / sessions but this is returning a very different value than what we see in GA4.

GA4 June 1-30 2024GA4 June 1-30 2024

Looker Studio June 1-30 2024Looker Studio June 1-30 2024

 

Looker custom metric configLooker custom metric config

 I understand that there will be some discrepancies between the two platforms but this is quite significant. Thanks for the help!

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Posted on --/--/---- --:-- AM
ArkadyZagdan
Silver 3
Silver 3
Reply posted on --/--/---- --:-- AM

@mcole18 
Perhaps the problem is withh theh methodology:

According to the  GA 4 documentation:

Average engagement time per session shows the time spent engaged with your website or app per session. Google Analytics uses the following formula to calculate the average engagement time per session:
Average engagement time per session = (The average time that your website was in focus in a user's browser or an app was in the foreground of a user's device) / (The total number of sessions)
Average engagement time per session is calculated automatically using data from the web pages and app screens that are set up with Google Analytics.
How to interpret the chart
The average engagement time per session in the tab may be greater than the individual average engagement time per session in the chart.
This is because the average engagement time per session in the tab shows the sum of engaged sessions per session divided by the number of sessions in the entire time period. Each point in the chart shows the average engagement time per session divided by the number of sessions for that day.
Example
Two users visited your website in July.
  • On July 2, user #1 has one engaged session of 3 minutes.
  • On July 3, user #2 has two engaged sessions of 3.5 minutes and 4.5 minutes.
  • On July 4, user #1 has one engaged session of 4 minutes and user #2 has one engaged session of 6 minutes.

In this example, the average engagement time per session in the tab would be 10m 30s because user #1 had a total of 7 minutes of engagement time and user #2 had a total of 14 minutes of engagement time in July. The average of those two engagement times would be 10.5 minutes of engagement time.

The average engagement time per session in the chart would look like the following:

  • July 2: 3 minutes of engagement time
  • July 3: 4 minutes of engagement time
  • July 4: 5 minutes of engagement time
In this example, the engaged sessions per user in the tab would be greater than the engaged sessions per user each day.

An you are using All sessions.

Arkady Zagdan - Bigglo
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