Website Visitors Duration

[JohnKC]

Hi guys,

When I look at my website's statistics I always see that most visitors don't stay more than 30 seconds in my pages. (AWStats in Bluehost Cpanel).

This is a subject that as an experienced webmaster I never read any info about and I want to know from you PRO webmasters what you think about the subject and how it is at your statistics.

How much time and percentage is considered good, normal & bad?

I'm trying to understand what I'm doing wrong in the last 2-3 years or maybe that is the way it is and I'm not doing anything wrong. Maybe my visitors get to my homepage and once they find what they're looking for they click the link within 30 seconds ant it gets into the statistics.

Or maybe it's how much time it takes them to leave my website...?

Please tell me what you think...

Thanks.

 

[mla16]

do you have adsense ads on the site?? maybe they look at your site, see an ad for something else then off they go, forgetting to go back to yours??

 

[Gummy56]

It's almost a how long is a piece of string question because there are so many variables that make up how long a visitor will stay on your site for.

What is the aim of your website? Is the length of time the visitor spends on a page important to the goal? Do you offer original content? How long is your content? there are a hundred questions to ask before any real advice could be given.

I have an affiliate site where people spend less than 15 seconds on the page, but seeing as they are coming from search and then clicking through to the merchants page (I track this), i'm happy with that as thats the goal.

I have another site that people spend about 5 minutes on average watching videos, this doesn't make me anywhere near as much money as the one where they click through in 15 seconds....

Content will keep people on your site. If your aim is to keep them there, look at improving your content. just my thoughts

 

[MrAnderson]

yeah I would think that you are giving your customers too many links to go to. I am also wonder if it is important for your customers to stay on your site?

Maybe they are buying your products right away b/c your landing page is sooo good.

 

[yanamk]

I believe that it depends entirely on what is your site about. If you present your visitors with reviews of products / services with ranking of some sort, they simply move on to the top suggested items.

If your site, however, offers educational material then maybe you should work harder on the content itself.

I wouldn't focus too much on the time though. If you create leads and get conversions, that's all it matters. After all, being an affiliate is to reffer those visitors to another site, huh?

 

[David Jackson]

When I look at my website's statistics I always see that most visitors don't stay more than 30 seconds in my pages. (AWStats in Bluehost Cpanel).

How much time and percentage is considered good, normal & bad?

Please tell me what you think...

Without actually seeing your website, no one can say with any degree of accuracy why visitors are clicking away in 30 seconds. Any attempt to do so would be pure speculation.

That being said, it's been my experience that overall site design, content relevancy and copywriting are strong determining factors in how long visitors remain on a site.

 

[djbaxter]

Other possibilities:

• Those 30 second visitors are spiders or bots.
• Your meta description or other content used as the "snippet" by search engines doesn't accurately describe the page content so people are clicking through expecting something different, realizing the error, and clicking away again.
• Your site looks overly spammy or "hard sell" and it's turning people off.
• Your site is slow to load and people are getting tired of waiting.

 

[adsquare]

Yeah, its pretty hard to tell you why (besides them being robots) without seeing your site.

 

[Joseph Ratliff]

You have no more than about 3 - 5 seconds to give people a reason to stay on your site...if you're not providing that reason...POOF! Off to another site the visitor goes.

But minstrel's advice above is excellent also.

 

[unitminer]

The best way to test what works on your site and what doesn't is to make real tests with Websiteoptimizer.

You can measure, which part of page causes high bounce rate of your website.
You can create multiple variations and evaluate, what is the best variation for your website.

On your place I would not care about time spent on site, but I will care about conversion of your website.
With tests you can find your Golden Webpage - without tests you just guess what could be better, but you don't really know if it is better.

{removed link to own site}

This test is still running, but we already know, that one variation improved conversion by 69%

I hope it will help you to optimize your website.

 

[joemo]

Try to have better content, also put ads in to this content to make it look natural

 

[victorm]

okay, I noticed you've been told already what might be wrong and what to do to fix it.

here are the results of a little experiment I ran for over 6mo in 2008. this site of mine, by the very nature of its content, is not encouraging people to linger around (they land, find what they need, go away). site was ranking 1st for certain keywords, PR1 and getting some 200 uniques per day. enter Google Analytics. site drops to PR0 and second page in SERP.
we noticed that bounce rate was high and visitors where coming from only a few sources.
dropped GA for testing, one month later the site is back (1st position, PR1).
put GA back, site drops.
removed GA again, site back. I call this causation.

added AdSense, site dropped a few positions (correlation, but not proven causation yet). retained its PR though.

My advice - stop sharing information with ANY 3rd party unless you really need to. You don't know what it is used for, and sometimes it can hurt your rankings.

 

[djbaxter]

One of the ways Google Analytics might negatively affect your bounce rate AND rankings is in increasing page load times.

Google had recently started emphasizing load speed as a factor in ranking. In your Google Webmaster account, you can look at how your page compares with similar pages in terms of load times. You can also get estimates of how much time various components of the page are taking or adding to total load time.

I looked at my sites that way and lo and behold the biggest drag on my page load times was - yep... Google Analytics.

I have other ways of analyzing my traffic. I don't see Google Analyitcs as at all essential. And yes, i know the claim that since the GA code is added at the very end of the page, it doesn't affect page loads - but Google's own data very clearly told me that was untrue.

I've now dumped GA. As I said, I have other means of looking at traffic sources and paths through sites that do not slow load times. All GA was giving me was a liability.