Help me understand Google Analytics stats

You GA experts are appreciated to share comments

[SlimKim]

Yesterday (2-9-20) my account shows for stats (Behavior-Engagement) 1466 visits at 601 to 1800 seconds and 1165 visits at over 1801 seconds, for a total of2631 visits greater than 600 seconds.

However if i add up each nations total that is greater than 10 minutes the total is5048 or almost double what Behavior - Engagement shows. These wacky numbers are on-going and not a one time thing. If you can think of a reason, please let me know.

[Dimitri]

1466 + 1165 = 2631

How do you come up to 5048 ? Or do you mean it's GA which is giving you 5048? If to, you know, GA certainly works like Google stuff, with mysterious numbers appearing and disappearing.

[SlimKim]

I come up with the 2631 number from the GA menu, I click Behavior and next Engagement and it shows entries as mentioned above.

To come up with 5048 number, from the GA menu i click
Audience
Overview
Input date range and apply
Next i click Country
Then click View Full Report
Next i click Average Session Duration, which then shows each nation greatest to least average time on site.
I then add up all the Users with a greater than 10 minute average duration.

Both numbers cannot be correct, or so it seems to me. I would think the higher number must be right. I just wonder if anyone experiences the same or if anyone has any reasoning at all, that could possibly explain the difference?

[NickMNS]

You're not comparing apples to apples.
In the Behavior engagement report you are getting number of sessions or page views that are above 600 seconds. That is the a session (or PVs) is only counted if and only if it has duration greater than 600 seconds. In the Audience Overview you are getting the number of sessions or users for any country where the average session duration is greater than 600 seconds.

Here is an example:
say for Canada there are 3 sessions with durations of [200, 601, 799] then the average session duration would be 533, so none of those sessions would be counted in Audience report. Now say for the US you have 5 sessions [100, 100, 575, 590, 2100] the average is 693 seconds and now all 5 are counted in the audience report. Whereas in the behavior for Canada 2 would be counted and for the US 1 would be counted. That is a total difference of 5 vs 3.

This is a made up example, but you need to be aware that the numbers can skew in any direction (at any time) and therefore you cannot compare these two reports.

[SlimKim]

Hmmm, makes sense. Most times there is a logical explanation. Thank you very very much for explaining. I'm confident you are right.