0 second visits according to Google Analytics

4th solution: GA breaks the segment of 0-10 into 0 (or N/A) and Greater than 0 - 10 Seconds

Problem solved.

The other proposed solutions do help to show engagement but requires more knowledge of how to implement, this 4th solution helps to KISS

From personal experience I used to be very discouraged that users spent seconds on my site until I read up a bit more on why it was being reported that way.

My fix was to "ping" GA with an event every 60 seconds. This results in about 55,000ish pings a day and has made my average time on site a little more like something I'd expect off a music streaming website(http://www.tubalr.com). My average time on Tubalr is around 1 hour with the new event tracking I'm doing.

Honest question here: Why do all this? If there are no secondary source of data that one can observe (subscriptions, adclicks, citations, google link scores...), then why spend so much time and energy on statistics?

We get a lot of questions at GoSquared (https://gosquared.com) as to why their engagement metrics (and visitor counts) are so different between GA and GoSquared.

Pinging all visitors to check their still online is our solution, rather than making a guess/estimate - this means that sometimes GA reports about 10 visitors online when there are actually more like 100.

This is especially true with HN posts where most people only visit the one page and then leave.

Thanks for the great post :)

Assuming you have a reasonable estimate on the time spent reading an article, the distribution of time spent on the page can be telling as to the quality of the article and how you conveyed the content.

If a reader leaves early that's possibly a symptom of poor writing. If you're lucky, it was just the wrong topic for the reader: no shame in that. If you're unlucky, however, it may be that your content is confronting.

If you have good content but it's not presented properly, you're not going to get value across to the reader. They'll decide to skim read, skip paragraphs, or just leave the page altogether.

In a perfect world, the readers would comment about what was problematic about the article. In the real world, they don't. They don't comment as they don't feel confident to speak about the topic. They don't comment as they don't feel it's worth their time. They don't comment as they don't want to sound stupid.

If average time spent reading a page (culling the outliers) is about the same as what you'd expect to read the article, it's a good signal that you have the right content and the right method of presentation. Authors can use this to help bring content to readers in a clearer and more engaging fashion -- a win-win for all involved.