Website Metrics

[spenland]

Hi everyone, I've noticed some alarming information on my companies website. After reviewing the metrics from the Clicktracks program that I use, I have discovered that around 65-75% of my visitors are leaving after only 1 second on the site. We get around 200-300 visits a day from PPC, maybe 120-200 visits organically, and the other 100 or so from referrals and direct visits.

I guess I'm just looking for some sort of benchmark to compare my website with, which I realize may be an impossible task. Do any of you notice a similar statistic on your websites? What do you think is the average rate for visitors leaving after only a 1 second visit?

I am currenty redesigning the website as well as our PPC programs so I'm hoping this will help the problem.

Thanks!

[spenland]

Anyone?

[Webnauts]

If you could tell us the URL, we might could tell more. :)

[DrTandem1]

I have a couple of thoughts on this from the limited information you shared:

1) Maybe the keywords you chose for PPC have no relevancy to your site and a visitor can determine this by quickly glancing at your page.

2) Click fraud.

[SemAdvance]

Hi there

When we first built http://www.americas-diamonds.com we found that 95% of the visitors left the site in under 15 seconds.

Being charged with driving traffic to the site I explained that I could and would drive even more but that it was useless if people did not stay.

We now have our visitor average on site time over 5 minutes and many over 15 minutes.

Try strong calls to action, links to deep pages in your site, offering more content.

Peace

[nashville]

First I am sorry you are located in 'Hell' per your profile. I hear its very warm down there.

Now back to the other issue:

1. Make sure your PPC ad and your landing page are in "sync". Meaning that you meet the 'clickers' expectation very quickly.

2. Make sure the stats program is only reporting human hits...one second is very short.

3. Make sure the page is actually loading and the visitor is not waiting to long, you will get a PPC charge AND a very short visit.

That's all I can think of really.

Again, sorry about you living in Hell.

[spenland]

Well I guess what I'm also looking for is some metrics to compare against. Do any of you webmasters out there know the percentage of your users that leave after only 1 second? I'm just not sure if a 70% bounce rate is worth concerning myself over.

I think that the click fraud should be at a minimum since I don't display my PPC ads in google's useless content and search networks. My organic visits have a pretty high bounce rate though, since people are finding us through a variety of technical keywords that spread across several industries.

[kjohnson5576]

My stats regularly tell me that about 70-75% of my traffic stays less than 30 seconds. I average around 400 visitors per day. It's interesting to note that when looking at latest visitors in my Cpanel, very often a person using PPC by Google Adwords doesn't even fully load the first page before they leave the site.

I think it's click fraud, but I can't prove it. Over the last two years, my ROI using Adwords has been terrible, so terrible in fact, I'm seriously considered just dumping PPC Ads. Overture is worse than Adwords as far as ROI goes, but neither are working the way they did just a couple of years ago.

Some may say it's my site, but I've talked to lots of customers who think the site is better than most of my competition, so I don't think it's that. Sometimes I wonder if my pricing is too far off, then another customer will come in and wonder how I can price so low. So I just don't know, but I suspect that click fraud and the rising cost of Ad placement are responsible for declining ROI.

[DrTandem1]

One second is somewhat vague. Is it possible that "one second" is the default visit time, if the page is not allowed to open? You see, if the page is taking over 15 seconds to load, it is quite likely that the visitor will leave before they see what the site has to offer.

If it is literally one second from the time they hit the site and then leave, then I would highly suspect click fraud. One second is not enough time for a page to open, have the visitor view it and then react to it.

[coreperformance]

I once used a free counter service that figured page hits this way: When you loaded a page, it recorded the time. When you loaded another page from the site, it recorded the time, then did the math to find out how long you were at the first page.

If the visitor loads one page, then uses the back button to navigate away, it couldn't figure the length of the visit. Your page may have been on their screen for 12 days, for all the counter knew.

[spenland]

Well I'm pretty sure that load time is not an issue. I have tested the site thoroughly on several different browsers and platforms with very quick load times.

And Gary, don't be sorry about Hell. This is where all the fun people are at.

[Inspector]

Dr. Tandum has a couple of very good posts. I curious as to why you haven't posted your web address.

[emperoni]

Before you give up on PPC, make sure that you can track how every click was generated. To do that effectively you really have to add variables to the url used by google and yahoo!. You want to track the advertised keyword for sure. Both google and yahoo! have automated ways of generating those links for you.

The metric I see is that about 10% of people coming to my web site leave without further exloring my site. So your number sounds high. I agree with some of the other posts that tell you to check your content.

[wige]

I got pretty lucky with my PPC campaign, getting a CTR of 5.5% or better and 95% of my site visitors click at least one link. From my understanding, this is higher than average.
One second is very short, probably too short for a human to determine if your site is what they want. However... If your software allows you to, you might want to check the referrer for the one-second visits. It may be that your site is showing up somewhere you don't expect. For example, my site is listed very high on Google under the keyword "Google tickets" (#2 until a certain news story hit, now on the second page), but my site has nothing to do with Google. A few people enter Google by mistake in a search and find my site, then leave immediately.
If it is a bot or something commiting click fraud, you may be able to determine this by looking at the IP addresses of the one second visits. At least some click frauders are unsophisticated, and don't hide their addresses. If you see the same IP or group of IPs, that may be what is happening.
Your software may also be rounding down, showing abandons after five or ten seconds as one second visits. Or it may be showing spiders or other automated activity. It may even log RSS feed downloads. Check with the manufacturer of the logging software in case there is a setting that needs to be adjusted.

[spenland]

I won't post my website URL for two reasons:

1. I know some of my competitors' webmasters use this forum and are probably reading this right now. I don't want them to know any stats about my site.

2. I'm currently redesigning the entire site, since I believe the current boring layout may be the source of my problems.

Thanks for all of your responses. It's amazing the responses you get when a post is featured in the webproworld newsletter!

[shoi]

I suspect its watching some flash loading thats the putoff (is it p-w-m thats the site?)

Steve

[mccreath]

Make sure you are not tracking crawlers or spiders. These don't support cookies, therefore sessions, therefore every click is a new visitor and every visitor only stays for one click.

(same goes for visitors with cookies turned off)

I would guess your system defaults to 1 second if only one page was visited in a session.

[incrediblehelp]

Seeing visitors leave this fast is normal. Here are some stats from last month of a few of the websites I watch:

Website #1
Visit Duration (Minutes) Visits
0-1 123,956
1-2 5,082
2-3 3,149
3-4 2,253
4-5 1,632
5-6 1,279

Website #2
Visit Duration (Minutes) Visits
0-1 220,774
1-2 10,114
2-3 6,522
3-4 4,869
4-5 3,657
5-6 2,973

website #3
Visit Duration (Minutes) Visits
0-1 39,333
1-2 1,950
2-3 1,168
3-4 811
4-5 556
5-6 372

All sell very different products and all use PPC.

See very normal for most visits to be under a minute, of course if most are under 1-2-3 secs then you want to look into if your website is being hit by a spider a lot or maybe come click fraud issues.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by mccreath

Make sure you are not tracking crawlers or spiders. These don't support cookies, therefore sessions, therefore every click is a new visitor and every visitor only stays for one click.

You beat me to it!

[murphypj]

Spenland,

You asked for some comparative metrics - I use AddFreeStats which is not as precise as your own metric s/w, but I've just run a check for June, and it shows 23% of visitors left after up to 30 seconds, with 32% staying 3 minutes or more. No PPC, just search and organic, but the site features top 10 for 'chords' and 'guitar chords' on Google and Yahoo. I would attribute the high % of early leavers to the ambiguity - some people searching for guitar chords to songs, others looking to learn chord patterns.

If there are such a high % of clicks on your very targetted PPC terms who leave immediately, I would have to concur with other posters - either something annoying ( slow loading flash intro ), bad metric results ( you can sign up for AddFreeStats free and compare ), or the dreaded 'click fraud'.

I'd hesitate to suggest the even worse alternative - that your content/presentation/first impression is not what the PPC visitors expected when they clicked the link. No offence, and I'm sure this isn't the case.

Hope this has given you something to compare with.

PJ

PS - Can't leave the post without mentioning that my site received it's 10 millionth visitor today - whoo-hooo!

[DrTandem1]

I'd be very concerned, if a site was losing hundreds of thousands of visitors within the first minute.

[incrediblehelp]

[quote="DrTandem1"]I'd be very concerned, if a site was losing hundreds of thousands of visitors within the first minute.[/quote

The results I posted were unfiltered. Also Tandem do you monitor many ecommerce websites that also get traffic that is a lot less qualified as PPC or organic search engine traffic is? If so you might be a little less concerned.

[A. Smith]

Can't leave the post without mentioning that my site received it's 10 millionth visitor today - whoo-hooo!

Congratulations!!!

Stats or not stats, the bottom line is: is your site profitable? Visits and such are good to know but they don't pay the bills ;).