Web Analytics: Average Time Spent on Site
If you’re tracking your site using Google Analytics, and you’re tracking the amount of time spent on your pages, you’ll probably notice some discrepancy with the average amount of time spent on the site.
I won’t question why many folks consider this metric useless not because they are worthless but because how analytics software measure them. One example is with Google Analytics.
Google did make this explanation. In the past, Google discarded “bounce” visitors or those who visited a page within the site and left without going further. Google thought that by excluding these visitors and measurement of “engaged” visitors or those who visited two or more pages, a better picture of how long visitors stayed in the site will be shown.
I kind of agree to this one since every one can access a site even by accident. “Accidental visitors” tend to leave the site immediately and their numbers can be overwhelmingly huge. So getting rid of these “accidental visitors” when computing for average time on site should be a good choice. However, many would disagree with me and Google Analytics so the original computation has been restored.
Can we have a choice to compute either with or without the “bounce” or “accidental” visitors?
3 Comments
I think it would be better to measure bounce rate by how much time users spend on the website, not how many pages they view. If someone clicks on your site, does a 5 second scroll through the page, clicks a link, 5 second scroll through that page, and promptly leaves the site then you don't have them counted as a bounce but instead an actual visitor when all they did was spend 10 second scrolling through pages. Now if every who spent under 30 seconds on a website was counted as a bounce, you might get a more accurate picture. If they're visiting a page that you have a 300 word article on, then it should only take them maybe 2 or 3 minutes to read.
I agree with you. In some cases when someone came to a site and left his machine for a while, that seems to show that the page is important that it warranted longer time of stay. But I don't think a lot of visitors have came into the site by accident.
Also, I'd go for that same keyword even if I know that people leave within five seconds. The problem may not be with the selection of keywords but maybe with content or layout that needed some fixing.
but even if someone accidentally came to site and stayed for few minutes it shows us that site HAS some "catchy" content, right? also, if i have like 100 visitors that came over Google's search for some keyword(s) i consider important for my site and i see that all 100 of them left after 5 seconds than i know that i should focus on some other keyword(s), right?
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