The Webtrends Optimize session allocation and session usage values are available in the UI. They can be found on the Dashboard screen immediately after login, and on the Account Overview screen, which also includes a rolling 12 month breakdown.
When comparing the platform session usage number vs the number of sessions recorded in your GA, there is likely to be some variation. This can occur for a number of reasons:
GA filters
Please ensure your GA view is raw and unfiltered. Alternatively, if you are using a filter for all analytics, let us know the conditions and we can also stop serving experiences to traffic that you would like to be excluded.
Consent Management
GA doesn't track prior to user opt in and consent to tracking. We have the ability to track with or without consent, with configuration options listed here. If your tag does not have consent management applied, or the two are using different opt-in criteria (e.g. functional vs performance vs targeting classification), our session usage numbers would include users that GA excludes.
Bounce Rate
GA is slow in capturing data. If a large number of people bounce from your site we may capture them, whereas GA would lose this data.
Bots
We recommend applying an audience to every experience to explicitly target users that you would like to include (e.g. by device, browser etc). However if you choose to run without an audience in order to capture everything, this would include bot traffic. GA aggressively filters out bots, so running experiences in this way would lead to higher session usage numbers.
Definition of Session
We match default GA configuration conditions, so there shouldn't be a difference. But it's worth being aware that GA inactivity is configurable, and definitions might change in future.
Behaviour | Webtrends Optimize | Google Analytics |
Timeout length | 30 min (hard-coded) | 30 min default (configurable: GA4 5min–7h55m) |
Reset trigger | Inactivity, rolling from last activity | Inactivity, rolling from last activity (same) |