I received an email recently with a good question about Google Analytics stats on the amount of time people spent on her website. She has been getting some good traffic, however, according to Google, everyone who visited from a search engine was not spending a single second there before leaving.
This has to do with how Google gets its data. Here is a screen shot to illustrate.
Average Time On Site is collected by timing how long visitors stay on a page before clicking on a link on your website. If someone goes to your site, then clicks on a link to visit another page on your website, that information is collected. However, if someone goes to your site, then leaves without clicking on another page (which is called a bounce), there is no time recorded.
So if you get 100 people going to a page on your website, finding the information they were looking for, reading it, then leaving, there is no data collected. Instead of saying “no data”, Google gives you “0.00″. If they stayed one minute or an hour, you will still get “0.00″.
Hardly fair, right? Well it doesn’t actually seem to be too bad. There is no evidence that Google penalizes you for your rank in future searches based on this lack of information.
So if you see those zero’s in the “Avg. time on site”, just check the bounce rate. If it says 100%, the number simply means no one has clicked on any other links. You will notice that if the bounce rate is not 100%, then you always have some amount of time recorded other than the big zero’s.
The Solution
If you want to find out if visitors are really reading your article, you can solve this problem simply by cutting the last couple paragraphs from your article and pasting them on a new page. Then add a “Continued….” with a link to the second page. Anyone engrossed in your article will most likely click on that link. Then you’ll get the data you were looking for, telling you how long are people spending on your page.
