New Info on Google Analytics

Google analytics is used to capture information about your site’s visitors. It can tell you how they found you, where they were when they came, what kind of device they used and what time of day it was. We find also how long they stayed at your site and how many pages, or URLs within it they viewed. We noticed that for some clients the average visit duration for several sections of the site was zero.

It’s pretty hard to get a duration of zero since the site takes longer than that to fully load. So we looked into it and found the following.
For sites, or sections of sites that display a photo gallery for instance, or any other media that doesn’t require user interaction, it seems that analytics is not able to capture a second time record for when they exited. It records the time of their arrival, but not their departure and so the duration reported is zero.

We checked this by making the page change it’s URL after a few seconds and found that the zero duration mystery was solved. So don’t be alarmed if you have a high bounce rate and low visit duration for URLs that make people watch without interacting. the truth is that you are probably making them “too interested” – spellbound. 🙂

If you haven’t seen or don’t have access to your analytics data, give us a call.