Metrics

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.

{ 13 comments }