Use session metrics to evaluate content paths

  • Updated

This article will help you:

  • Use legacy metrics to enhance your analyses

Sometimes considered “legacy metrics,” session metrics—like bounce rate or exit rate—are helpful diagnostic tools for obtaining a deeper understanding of the performance of campaigns or content items. 

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In Amplitude Analytics, you can find session metrics in the Data Tables charts, on the Metrics tab. Other than session totals, session metrics—bounce rate, exit rate, entry rate, entries, and exits—are not available as standalone metrics in Amplitude Analytics. Instead, these session metrics are calculated from the group-by you select, and will only include active events in the computation. Amplitude Analytics uses the group-by to determine how many values are present, and the sequence to be used for calculation. 

Feature availability

This feature is available to users on Growth and Enterprise plans only.

Select a good group-by property

The most common properties to select for your group-by are page- or screen-level properties that change as a user interacts with your app or site. These work well because they are likely to vary between most of the relevant events, and are set frequently enough to signal a bounce when needed.

Example: Group-bys and session metrics

Amplitude Analytics will use the number of values of your group-by property to determine whether to classify a session as a specific metric, such as bounce, entry, or exit.

Here is an example session:

    1. Event: Pageview
      Page = A
      Cat = B
    2. Event: Click
      Name = 1A
      Type = Ad
    3. Event: Pageview
      Page = B
      Cat = B
    4. Event: Buy
      Amt = $10
      Prod = 1

Bounce

If you group by the Name event property, Amplitude Analytics will classify this session as a bounce. This is because there is only one value for that property (1A) for the entire session, even though there are four distinct events in this session.

This would also be true if the name property appeared more than once in a session and held the same value each time.

If you group by the Page event property, Amplitude Analytics will not classify this session as a bounce. This is because there are two values for that property (A and B) in the session.

NOTE: For a channel report, the bounce rate does not represent a summary of the bounce rates of each the landing page across all channels, no matter what group-by you use. Instead, the bounce rate would represent the fraction of time a session has only that one channel value (since most sessions only have one channel, this is most of the time).

Entry and exit

Entry and exit session metrics are defined by the corresponding values of the first or last value, respectively, for the group by's property within the session. The entry and exit rates are then calculated by the corresponding number of entries or exits divided by the number of sessions. 

Using the previous group by of the Page event property, Amplitude Analytics will count event 1 as the entry event (on page A) and event 3 as the exit event (from page B), even though event 3 is not the last event of the session. This is because event 4 does not include the Page property, and so cannot include the group-by event property.