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HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

quantisan.com

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Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#11

Post by plam »

lenazegher wrote: post #8

These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

I apologise for my naive misunderstanding of the Analytics metric. I've updated the post to point this out at the top of my post. Thanks for the explanation!

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#12

Post by stopcyring »

lenazegher wrote: post #8

These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

what if i told you they use the onUnload event?

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#13

Post by tehwebguy »

stopcyring wrote: post #12
lenazegher wrote: post #8

These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

what if i told you they use the onUnload event?

Do they?

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#14

Post by johnpowell »

Interesting. I posted a link to my shithole of a site in a comment a hundred deep in a post that had reached the top of the frontpage and had fallen to pretty much the bottom when I posted in the thread.

I got a extra 300 visitors that day and about 50 the next. The average visitors per day is around 25 so this is a big and noticeable spike.

I guess I am kinda shocked a random link in the middle of a dying thread generated that much traffic while something hitting the frontpage only generated about 53 times more traffic.

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#15

Post by plam »

stopcyring wrote: post #12
lenazegher wrote: post #8

These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

what if i told you they use the onUnload event?

do they?

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#16

Post by olalonde »

Here are my stats for two of my blog posts that made the front page:

http://syskall.com/how-to-roll-out-your-own-javascript-api-w...

    3051 visits
    00:00:16 average visit duration
    98.9% less than 10 seconds
http://syskall.com/yc-w12-startups-hosting-decisions/index.h...

    3920 visits
    00:00:14 average visit duration
    99.1% less than 10 seconds
Somewhat depressing...

(edit: according to lenazegher's comment the average visit duration stats might not be as bad as they look since my bounce rate was pretty high, ~95% on both posts)

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#17

Post by stopcyring »

stopcyring wrote: post #12
lenazegher wrote: post #8

These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

what if i told you they use the onUnload event?

they track heatmaps might as well count that + 100 other hacks.

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#18

Post by _mpf »

lenazegher wrote: post #8

These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

I`ve checked how it works with "Real-Time" option of the Google Analytics. When i closed a tab Google Analytics knew that i stopped reading the page (the on-line user counter was updated -1). Maybe it works different with a standard report (i didn`t read the code), but maybe not? They could use javascript browser events detection and i don`t think such a bug would remain unseen.

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#19

Post by dasil003 »

johnpowell wrote: post #14

Interesting. I posted a link to my shithole of a site in a comment a hundred deep in a post that had reached the top of the frontpage and had fallen to pretty much the bottom when I posted in the thread. I got a extra 300 visitors that day and about 50 the next. The average visitors per day is around 25 so this is a big and noticeable spike. I guess I am kinda shocked a random link in the middle of a dying thread gen…

You should put your site in your profile so you can see how many people come after you post an offhand reference to the fact that you may have once written something interesting elsewhere.

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#20

Post by kijin »

As other commenters have mentioned, 0 seconds doesn't mean anything. Meanwhile, those 18 visitors who spent more than 1800+ seconds on your page? Probably they just opened the page in a new tab and only got around to reading it a few hours (or days) later. So data at both extremes are useless.

If we ignore the 0-second anomaly, it looks like we've got a nice bell curve peaking between 180-600 seconds, probably closer to 180 than to 600. That sounds about right for a 670-word article.

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