A word of caution: make sure to set the "opt_noninteraction" flag in the event tracking to "true" otherwise your bounce rate will be off.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
0 second visits according to Google Analytics
41–50 of 59 posts
Re: 0 second visits according to Google Analytics
#42I believe this article is false.
I have a site that is extremely heavy on front page traffic. Basically 97% of all traffic is front page traffic, and 75% of all traffic is single visit (they hit the front page and nothing else). 55% of traffic does not generate multiple page views on any given day.
I have absolutely no problem with Google reporting 0 second visits. In fact, quite the opposite, Google reports very high visit durations, as visitors tend to spend a lot of time on the front page and then leave. If there were a problem with 0 second counting, it would decimate my time on site numbers due to all the people not generating second page requests for GA to count.
I've been using Google Analytics since they purchased it, and have never run into this problem (across millions of uniques and two dozen sites). The only time I've ever seen 0 second requests on any scale, is from bots, and in that case they're easy to out by looking at flash settings + browser version. If you're seeing a huge number of 0 second requests, it's most likely a bot.
Re: 0 second visits according to Google Analytics
#43We 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 pe…
Does that mean GoSquared will report a page that has been open for days, taking up a tab but not being actively looked at, as 'online', or is there a timeout after a specific period of inactivity?
We monitor if the page is focused or blurred, so you can get both metrics in real-time.
Re: 0 second visits according to Google Analytics
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I do a lot of content based marketing in different market/industries. The type of testing you describe is best used in addition to click-through rates. Due to how presentation and content can be both right, and still get you bad results. How come? The offer stinks. If the offer stinks, then the click-through rates will show. And that's the most important metric of this group that you should pay attention to: how inte…
Agreed but that's only applicable when you have a product.
I should have specified that I was coming at this from the point of view that someone's writing a single page article or blog post with no conversion target other than to have it read.
If you're actually aiming to achieve anything concrete with a web page, then the only way to improve that is exactly as you said: directly track conversion to your goal.
Re: 0 second visits according to Google Analytics
#45We added a page ping event into Snowplow for this exact reason. Tracking user activity on the page, including where/when the user scrolls around the page, yields a lot of interesting data, including average % of page read, by page:
http://snowplowanalytics.com/blog/2013/04/18/measuring-conte...
Re: 0 second visits according to Google Analytics
#46Honest 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?
Sounds to me like a version of the Politician's Fallacy. We must measure something, this is something we can measure, therefore we must measure it.
Re: 0 second visits according to Google Analytics
#47I block google analytics with noscript. No downside for me.
Well, there's a downside in the sense that no-one will ever see how you use web sites, so when they change their behaviour and break functionality you used to use, you'll have no-one but yourself to blame.
Google Analytics is like loyalty cards for the web: they track user behaviour for the benefit of the service provider, not the consumer. But a "real" loyalty card at least pretends to serve the user by offering an occasional special deal or some savings, as opposed to added cost (bandwidth, load times etc). I vote with Ghostery.
Re: 0 second visits according to Google Analytics
#48I believe this article is false. I have a site that is extremely heavy on front page traffic. Basically 97% of all traffic is front page traffic, and 75% of all traffic is single visit (they hit the front page and nothing else). 55% of traffic does not generate multiple page views on any given day. I have absolutely no problem with Google reporting 0 second visits. In fact, quite the opposite, Google reports very hig…
I don't think it's false. I have a site with one page, one video. Time on site really is zero seconds.
However, playing the video may trigger an event that allows Google to measure some of the visits.
Re: 0 second visits according to Google Analytics
#49This happens a lot with landing pages because many times there is no 2nd page view as people don't convert. In landing pages this metric is super important. If a person left after 5 seconds your page is probably ugly. If a person leaves after 1min your content might not be convincing enough or no clear call to action. You need to know when people usually leave your page in order to know how to fix it. In http://www.pagealizer.com/ we track the time spent on page (beside other metrics) by pinging the visitor.
Re: 0 second visits according to Google Analytics
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do a lot of content based marketing in different market/industries. The type of testing you describe is best used in addition to click-through rates. Due to how presentation and content can be both right, and still get you bad results. How come? The offer stinks. If the offer stinks, then the click-through rates will show. And that's the most important metric of this group that you should pay attention to: how inte…
Agreed but that's only applicable when you have a product. I should have specified that I was coming at this from the point of view that someone's writing a single page article or blog post with no conversion target other than to have it read. If you're actually aiming to achieve anything concrete with a web page, then the only way to improve that is exactly as you said: directly track conversion to your goal.
I do think one should always have an offer of sone kind. Even if its an email subscription to a blog. That way you can develop a redership for possible future offerrings. Specially useful if you see startup in the near future.