Interpret your User Sessions chart

Amplitude Academy

Uncover How Long Users Spend in Your Product with User Sessions

Learn how to use the User Sessions chart to analyze the time users spend in your product.

The User Sessions chart helps answer questions about your product's users, such as user frequency, user engagement length, and how those metrics differ by user segment.

Interpret your User Sessions chart

The results in User Sessions depend on the metrics you chose while building your chart, such as a count of sessions or a count of events.

The example below displays a daily count of sessions with at least one Add to Cart event for all users over the last 30 days. The chart also filters users by Country (United Kingdom).

The same chart with an added group segment by Carrier shows the segmented carriers as different colored lines.

The data table

A table of session or event data appears below the chart. To specify which segments to see in the graph, click a segment name in the breakdown table. To download the table, click Export CSV.

Using the example above, Amplitude segmented the breakdown table's results by Carrier.

Amplitude counts users as (none) if the segmented property values aren't available when the events trigger. Read more about (none) or unexpected values in this FAQ article.

The three ways Amplitude records sessions

Amplitude records sessions on either the server side or the client side. Client-side sessions can be either mobile or web.

Server side: Use the HTTP API v2 to track sessions on the server side by including a value in the session_id field. The session_id value is the number of milliseconds since epoch, counting from the start of the session.
Client side (mobile): When you use Amplitude's mobile SDKs, events triggered within 5 minutes of each other count toward the current session by default. The time of the first event marks the session's start time, and the last event triggered marks the end time. For example, an 'Open App' event can mark the first event. Amplitude counts events sent within five minutes of each other toward the current session.
Client side (web): When you use Amplitude's JavaScript SDK, events triggered within 30 minutes of each other count toward the current session by default. The time of the first event marks the session's start time, and the last event triggered marks the end time.

You can also define a session without instrumenting your events first, by setting a custom session property.

The User Sessions chart only displays data if you send a session ID with your events. Amplitude's SDKs handle this automatically, unless you flag an event as out-of-session (assigning the session ID a value of -1). If you're using Amplitude's HTTP API, you must explicitly send a session_id with your events.

How filtering works in the User Sessions chart

Filtering events for the User Sessions chart is a multi-step process. The order of those steps matters.

First, Amplitude filters for events that match the property filters. Amplitude then takes those events and groups them into sessions, which lets Amplitude calculate session length and count events performed each session.

Property filters apply before session filters. Amplitude filters on raw events first, then on the filtered events.

Amplitude only considers events with property filters when computing session length.

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