One thing most of us want to know about our site is how long people are visiting. Have we managed to capture their attention and keep them engaged for hours on end or are they coming in, looking around and leaving after only a few seconds? Depending on the nature of your site either option may be acceptable. But we can work to improve the user experience knowing this information. As we discussed earlier, the Time on Site report under Visitor Trending will give you an average amount of time visitors spend on your site. But one important factor to keep in mind is that averages sometimes lie, or at the very least do not always present the whole picture. Visitor Loyalty reports on the other hand are “bucketized.” Meaning every visitor or visit must fall into a particular category. So it may present a more realistic picture of your data.
Take a look at the Time on Site and Length of Visit reports side by side to get a better understanding of the bucket concept.
For the time period of December 14,2008 to December 20,2008 we see that the average time on site was 1 minutes and 45 seconds.
But now look at the Length of Visit report. This paints a different picture. 70.09% of our visits lasted 10 seconds or less. Those visits in the 60 to 600 second range skew the average a bit.
The “bucketized” views offered in the Visitor Loyalty reports can help use better understand the numbers we are seeing.
Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Loyalty – Depth of Visit
Mike Small
Mike Small leads the SEM and paid search efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about Mike here.
See more posts by Mike Small
