Visit length, how long are your visitors visits?

[Niko Holopainen]

I thought this an interesting question since my site is mainly content with (hopefully) the sheer amount of information leading to trust and therefore sales.

Using Awstats, I'm able to see the visit lengths (with robots and our employees visits filtered out). While some customers just pop in to check the inventory listings, many come to seek information and of them the conversion rates seem decent.

Here's the first month's listing of our revised site's visits:

Number of visits (#): 2868, average 239s
0-30s, #1756, 61,2%
30s-2min, #399, 13,9%
2min-5min, #265, 9,2%
5min-15min, #253, 8,8%
15min-30min, #97, 3,3%
30min-1hour, #67, 2,3%
1hour+, #31, 1%

How are yours? I'm naturally trying to increase the length by providing interesting content and I'm quite worried (possibly needlessly) about the sheer amount of shortest duration visits - I mean, doesn't that mean that people are turned off by the site (even though the logs show 50% return during the same month).

[deadBird]

What's your website? Remember that a good index page, gets people away from the index page. Draw them in!

[vivekar]

More robots means more <30s numbers.
They just whiz past each and every page.
Humans do it at a slower rate.

With AWStats, it is hard to calculate how much human visitors stayed for long.
Urchin stats are wonderful.
Please find the clickpaths of your visitors and pageviews. It is the best indicator of your website traffic. Ignore the hits.

Last month MSNbot created havoc on my stats. I made it slow down.

[Niko Holopainen]

Thanks, the website is on the signature.

Awstats should mark the bots separately but I'm thinking thats precisely the issue, since I get a fair number of bots that are listed separately from human visitors.

I'm sure the main issue is with working on the index page and that will be the next projext ;) Thanks for the feedback.

Awstats doesn't provide for clickpaths and I'm figuring I might go for Webtrends for exactly that reason =)

Thanks for your replies,

[Sergio Simarro]

Here have our June statistics so you can compare with yours:
0s-30s 32.4%
30s-2mn 19.9%
2mn-5mn 15.7%
5mn-15mn 17.5%
15mn-30mn 6.6%
30mn-1h 5%
1h+ 2.5%

I do not make any difference between robots and human but, according to the time a reservation usually lasts, they seem quite accurate.

I have noticed that your web site is from Finland (I cannot read it, just the domain extension, so I do not know what it is about) and perhaps the finnish community is not the public that should read your site content.

If you can explain me what the site is about, I could help you a bit more.

Kind regards.

[Niko Holopainen]

Thank you for your replies, I'm sure the issue is with the content - people logging in quickly and either moving forward or staying to read. The second and third highest pages for visits are the for sale and for rent pages (capturing about 80% and 60% of the visits respectively).

The issue may be, that the pages load quickly (~22kb) and people find what they're looking for quickly, but I doubt it, that would truly be too good to be true - it has to be the fact that the content needs re-evaluation...

0s-30s 55.4 %
30s-2mn 13.8 %
2mn-5mn 11.1 %
5mn-15mn 10.3 %
15mn-30mn 4.1 %
30mn-1h 3.3 %
1h+ 1.1 %
Unknown 0.4 %

The site is in Finland and in finnish, it's aimed for the finnish timeshare owner/potential owner customerbase as well as those seeking for additional information about timeshares in Finland (as well as some in Spain and Sweden, although the inventory will be extended somewhat in the near future).

We're working on the english version, but it will take some time as yet - considering that there's hundreds of pages to translate. Upon completion or near completion the site will be promoted internationally as well.

For reference our target audience is around 60-80.000 people, of which about 50% don't really use the internet, of whom we currently have about 2.000-3.000 monthly visitors, so there's great room for improvement as yet.

Yours truly,

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Niko Holopainen

Awstats doesn't provide for clickpaths and I'm figuring I might go for Webtrends for exactly that reason =)

Sawmill has clickpaths. Can report on exit pages also. It does seperate bot from normal traffic, and you can apply your own filters to ignore traffic.

It will run as standalone executable on your Server (preferred) or as a Windows desktop application (which comes with it's own server so you can access it remotely).

http://www.sawmill.net/ It is pretty cheap, and right now you can get a free copy by doing a survey (while you are learning how to use it at the same time). http://www.sawmill.net/testing.html