Sessions
What is a session?
A session is the period of time a contact is active across your website and product. Typically, a session would be split into two categories – a a Product Session or a Web Session. Tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel focus on product sessions, while Google Analytics and Hubspot look at web sessions.
Flywheel connects, combines, and also individually tracks these two concepts. Furthermore, Flywheel uses these combinations to create advanced action-based metrics explained below.
What defines a session?
Flywheel’s definition of a session is straightforward. If a user fires events, and then stops firing events for 30 minutes (or more), a session is created and any future events are attributed to a new session.
Why are Flywheel’s sessions unique?
As mentioned previously, most companies focus on either Web or Product sessions. Since Flywheel in unique in joining both marketing and product data, we’re able to connect a session’s activity across properties.
Example: A known contact opens your email about the newest product feature. They click a link in the email to the blog post explaining how to use it. Interested, they log into your product and navigate to the feature. They then try out the feature successfully. Flywheel would track something similar to the following as one session:
This cross-property session tracking is what allows Flywheel to determine which assets prompt in-product actions and events.
Session types
Sessions are grouped into categories based on their source type. After integrating Segment with Flywheel, you will be prompted to set a Source Type for each source. This allows you to define if events should be labeled as marketing, product, or part of a specific asset class such as Docs.
Product sessions
A product session is a cluster of events triggered by the same contact without 30 minutes of inactivity, specifically from an event source marked as “Product”.
Marketing sessions
A marketing session is a cluster of events triggered by the same contact without 30 minutes of inactivity, specifically from an event source marked as “Marketing”.
Asset class sessions
Companies that utilize subdomains can classify their sources as being a specific type of asset. Common examples of these are Documentation (docs.domain.com) or Articles (help.domain.com). Simply integrate the Segment source for these subdomains, then classify them as the correct asset class.
Cross-property sessions
Flywheel tracks Marketing, Product, and Asset sessions separately behind the scenes. If it notices a marketing session followed by a product session within 30 minutes, Flywheel will assume the marketing session has prompted the product sessions.
For convenience, Flywheel joins these two sessions together in the UI to create a single, cross-property session.
Session metrics
Sessions are used across the Flywheel platform. Here are explanations for some of those use cases.
New user sessions
Sessions are defined as a New user session if Flywheel has no record of previous product sessions for that contact. Here’s an example.
A contact visits your website for the first time a week ago after clicking on a paid ad. They visit the homepage, pricing page, and some blog articles. Since these events occur shortly after one another, Flywheel will track them all as the same contact session across Marketing and Asset properties.
Today, that same contact visits your website again and signs up for your product, firing an Account Created event. As they’ve triggered their first event from a Product property, they will have generated their first product session. Flywheel will categorize this as a New user session.
Active user sessions
Active user sessions apply to contacts who have triggered a product session, plus at least one other product session in the past 30 days.
Resurrected user sessions
Resurrected user sessions are almost identical to Active user sessions, except that they only apply to contacts who have not triggered a product session within the past 30 days.
