How to pull sessions and page views from GA4

One request, both metrics

The Data API takes a list, so sessions and page views come back together.

{
  "dateRanges": [{ "startDate": "2026-10-01", "endDate": "2026-10-07" }],
  "dimensions": [{ "name": "date" }],
  "metrics": [{ "name": "sessions" }, { "name": "screenPageViews" }]
}

metricValues in each row is positional, matching the order you asked. Build a lookup from your own request rather than indexing with a literal, because reordering the metrics array silently reassigns every reader downstream.

const index = Object.fromEntries(query.metrics.map((m, i) => [m.name, i]));
const sessions = Number(row.metricValues[index.sessions].value);

What a GA4 session is

A session starts with a session_start event and ends after thirty minutes of inactivity, or at midnight in the property's timezone.

That midnight rule is the one that differs from most tools. A visit spanning midnight is two sessions in GA4, not one. On a consumer product with evening traffic this inflates session counts relative to anything that stitches across the boundary.

The thirty-minute timeout is configurable per property. If somebody changed it, your historical series has a step in it that is not behaviour.

engagedSessions is the one people actually want

GA4 added a definition that Universal Analytics did not have.

GA4's bounce rate is therefore the inverse of engagement, not Universal Analytics' single-pageview definition. The two numbers are not comparable and a chart that puts them on one axis across the migration date is wrong.

For most purposes engagedSessions is the more honest traffic figure, because it excludes the accidental arrivals that a raw session count treats as visits.

screenPageViews counts repeats

Unlike users, page views are not de-duplicated. A visitor loading the same page five times is five page views, which is what a page view is.

That also means summing daily rows is correct for page views, unlike active users. The two metrics in the same response behave differently under addition, which is a genuinely confusing property of GA4 reporting and worth a comment in whatever code does the summing.

Pages, not just totals

Swap the dimension to get the breakdown:

{
  "dimensions": [{ "name": "pagePath" }],
  "metrics": [{ "name": "screenPageViews" }],
  "orderBys": [{ "metric": { "metricName": "screenPageViews" }, "desc": true }],
  "limit": 20
}

pagePath excludes the host and the query string. pagePathPlusQueryString keeps the query, which fragments your top pages across every UTM variant and is almost never what you want in a ranking.

Timezone

Every date dimension is bucketed in the property's reporting timezone, which is set in GA4 and not derived from your request. A change to it does not restate history, so a property whose timezone was corrected has a seam.

In the notch

Notch Metrics reports GA4 sessions and page views in the MacBook notch, daily, weekly or monthly, with a sparkline and a comparison against the previous window.

Place them beside active users and the three describe the visit rather than just counting it. Everything Google Analytics reports, or download Notch Metrics.