Comments on: Time on Site & Time on Page – Google Analytics metric mystery

By: Carl

Carl — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:16:30 +0000

Regarding the proposed adjustment of screening out bounces, that will help, but it still does not provide an accurate estimate because a visitor could land on your page, click off to a second page after 5 seconds, and then stay on that second page for 20 minutes, but the time on site would still display as 5 seconds.

One of my sites has a curious variant of this problem because it loads an iframe containing help pages on the main page using Javascript a few seconds after it comes up, and so the report has numerous visits that are a few seconds long, and no bounces at all.

My main page has interactive Javascript content, and that content is the main reason a visitor would come to the site, so it is entirely possible for a visitor to spend the entire visit there without loading another page.

A real solution might be for GA to hook the browser events in Javascript to detect user activity and then when a browser close was finally detected to report the time between the first page load and the most recent user action (not including the close). This could also solve the problem of users leaving the browser open and running off to do something else. Maybe GA does not want to do something that invasive and potentially disruptive, though, so it is what it is.

By: nicole saunders

nicole saunders — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:59:08 +0000

That was a highly informative article…Thanks for a lot for posting it…keep up the gr8 work…

By: Measuring Website Usage With Google Analytics, Part I « JISCPress

Measuring Website Usage With Google Analytics, Part I « JISCPress — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:42:12 +0000

[...] Which is why the emphasis on collecting stats from at last two pages: given the current crop of analytics tools that struggle to do anything meaningful with single page visits, specifying a two page visit means that not only visits to the site that are likely to be meaningful are reported, but also that the reports are more likely to contain meaningful data too. (There is an obvious problem here: if visitors visit two pages, and quickly click to the second from the first before exiting the site from the second page, the time spent on the second page won’t be captured? See for example Time on Site & Time on Page – Google Analytics metric mystery) [...]

By: Measuring Website Usage With Google Analytics, Part I at Actually…

Measuring Website Usage With Google Analytics, Part I at Actually… — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:22:35 +0000

By: usability testing

usability testing — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:56:33 +0000

this post is incredible helpful! i could not figure out what all those 0:00 visits meant and your site has the clearest explanation.

so another question – is there an easy way to remove or filter these “bounce” visits from our site analytics? it seems like these visits from bots or other sources are skewing our site metrics – is that correct? is there a standard practice around this that you would suggest?

thanks

By: iprogrammer

iprogrammer — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:55:25 +0000

Hi Abhi this is great article, but can you elaborate on Time on Page & Time on Site, I mean according to your article are these 2 totals should be equal? If No then can you please explain why?

By: Abhishek Bhardwaj

Abhishek Bhardwaj — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:19:11 +0000

Re: eye tracking research

Yes the formula you applied gave you the actual time spent on your site i.e. the time spent by actual visitors who stayed on your website. This formula excludes the visitors who bounced without navigating further into your site.

By: eye tracking research

eye tracking research — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 02:59:43 +0000

Ah, this is a GREAT article. All of the 0:00 page views in google analytics were confusing the heck out of me! I thought they might be from automated bots? (is there any way to estimate that?)

I took your formula and applied it – very helpful.

personally i find it a little easier to compute this more quickly by multiplying the reported site time by 100/bounce rate.

example:
*reported site time = 65 seconds. *bounce rate of 50%

**actual time: then 100/50% = 2 and 2*65 =130seconds.

By: Pagealizer

Pagealizer — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:12:08 +0000

All site analytics show you some stats on how long people visit your page. Most site analytic services guess how long a visitor has been on a page by noting when a visitor arrives and that visitor views another page in the site. This calculation is a good estimate in general but has its weakness when calculating first page visit length – sometimes there isn’t a second page view. Pagealizer does actual counting. Our tracking code pings the tracking server as long as the visitor has the page open.
This metric is very important for landing/sales pages which a lot of times do not trigger another page view and help you understand if people read your page. If for example you have long copy and most people visit your page for 10 seconds you might need to add more call to action links on the top of your page or reduce the amount of text. Check us out