If you have a blog or web site and use Google Analytics as your analytics package, you may have come across a disappointing statistic: visits of no length, or 00:00:00.
Here is an example of where you might come across this metric. The screen capture below is from another site I manage. This report is the Traffic Sources > Keywords report.
As you can see, for several keywords I’ve registered average visit lengths of no length whatsoever (00:00:00). That doesn’t sound good. Let’s look a little closer.
Keywords in rows 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 are the 00:00:00 visits. They also have something else in common. Each of these visits is of only one web page (the value in the Pages/Visit column is 1.0 for each of these keywords). Single page visits, called Bounces in most analytics packages are handled different ways by different packages. Before moving forward, let’s be clear about what a Bounce is.
A Bounce, or Single Page View Visit is a visit in which the user arrives at a web page, and then leaves the web site altogether. If the user even refreshes the same page, it is not a Bounce. A bounce is someone arriving at your site, then doing one of several things such as clicking the back button, typing a new destination into the address bar of their browser, closing their browser program altogether (you get the point – basically anything but continuing to view pages on your web site).
OK. So all of our 00:00:00 visits were also Bounce visits. That still seems quite surprising. None of the visits registered even a second on the site? Well, the visits may have been a second, ten seconds, or several minutes. We just don’t know, and we don’t know due to the way Google Analytics calculates Time on Site (or Time on Page).
To calculate how long a user is on a page, Google needs two data points. It needs the time when a page was loaded (which in our case it has) and the time when a subsequent page was requested from the site (which it does not have). So, in lieu of that last piece of data, Google classifies these Bounce visits as 00:00:00 in length.
It would also stand to reason that every visit to a web site is registered as shorter than it actually is as the amount of time spent on the last page of the site prior to exiting can’t be calculated.
On a side note…
If you are reviewing metrics on individual pages, Google does not include Bounce visits into the equation when it calculates the average time spent on that page. For the average time spent on site, however, it does.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks a lot Scott! I’ve been staring at my Google Analytics for some time now and couldn’t make out how on earth someone could stay on a page for no seconds at all. Now I have the answer, cheers!
Vlad
Thanks for that clarification, I was thinking that maybe it’s counting bot/spider visits as zero duration because they are not real visitors. But now that I think of it, Google is probably smarter than that and doesn’t count spiders at all in Analytics.
Interesting article but I think I didn't quite understood. Google Analytics needs 2 points to know how long a user was on the website the time the 1st page was requested and the time another page was requested.
If another page isn't requested that visitor will be considerer as a bounce and it's time on site will be counted as 00:00:00. Is this correct?
Yes, you're understanding it correctly.
That explains alot – I've been using the “download speed test” for days now – thinking that my host is having problems – but now I can stop all the site download speed tests.
This post explained a lot. I was very upset to see that I had a 100% bounce rate with 0:00 time on site but now I feel somewhat better.
Great. That had me freaking out
Cheers for that. Nice, short, clear. Thanks.
thanks for the tip, I was thinking my content was rubbish with the 0:00:00 but that explains alot
Thanks for the great discussion. I think yours is the best on point. I’ve directed people I’ve helped in your direction from Doodgical.com (if you happen to see that in your analytics).
oh thank goodness . . . and thank you for this information. I was having trouble with my site loading in certain browsers and was starting to feel like it would never end. I guess I’ll wait until I get another complaint and now pore over those 0.00 stats anymore.
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