Watching the consumers
Many journalists tell me that the numbers for Web site visitors are watched very closely in their newsrooms. They know which videos get clicks and which ones don’t. They know which thumbnails translate into high numbers for photo galleries. These numbers are driving a lot of decisions about resources — and content — on news Web sites, from what I gather.
I wonder whether the number-watching is focused on the right numbers.
You big guys can laugh at my little numbers, but I really would like to know if there’s any pattern to be discovered among those folks who view more than two pages. If there is a pattern, that would be some very useful stuff to know.
Likewise, I’d love to know what the folks who stay so long are liking so much. The 78 percent who are gone in 30 seconds don’t interest me. I think I would learn more from studying the 12 percent who hang around longer.
These charts come from Google Analytics — but surely you can get something comparable from your Omniture data.
I know there’s all kinds of crazed devotion to hits and clicks and pageviews, and I know “time spent” is problematic in its own right. But what I’m looking at here is a question about what a site is doing right.
Analyze that, and maybe we can learn how to do more of it.
Categories: teaching
I would conjecture that the extended time on site numbers might be due, in part, to the people like me who often leave multiple tabs open all day.
I study Omniture reports like tea leaves. If you study the data enough you do see all kinds of patterns. I’ve learned that Flash with simple navigation have much longer “time spent” numbers. I also like to see what sites referred traffic to a story. That really shows the power of Google, social networking sites and bloggers. (As if there was any doubt!) I don’t design everything around Omniture, but I think it can help make good decisions.
I too assume that there are a handful of people who leave tabs open all day, though there are bound to people who stick to the site cos they’ve found something they like.
At work we have a bespoke system that tracks visitors to the site in real time, and shows entrance sources and keywords and individual visitor paths across the site.
Cross-referencing with GA allows for a much fuller picture of the way people interact with the site.
One thought about “tabs left open all day”: Using Site Meter, I often check stats for individual visitors to my blog. I’ve very rarely seen any numbers for more than 30 minutes or so, and I’ve never seen one for multiple hours (the most I’ve seen is between one and two hours, and that’s extremely rare). So, yeah, I leave tabs open on my screen when I leave the room, and so do many people, but I’d venture to say that those hours are not being recorded.
I think it would be worthwhile to investigate and see whether there are patterns in what the long-stayers look at.
I am one of the people who can, indeed, stay for an hour on your blog, Mindy, and it’s because I’ve learned more about online journalism and its practitioners here than anywhere else. You share very generously and bring like people together.
I appreciate your tutorials and sharing of your materials at workshops, etc. Thank you for putting such an awesome blog together.
@Mindy
True. I’d bet there’s an interesting explanation for the outliers, and definitely need to learn more about how Google Analytics arrives at the numbers it does.
most views are from RSS right? So if I subscribe to your site via google reader for example and I see you have 8 new posts. I look at those posts in the reader staying 8 seconds total, does that mean 8 hits of under 10 seconds each?If I look at the posts for a minute in the reader, does that mean 8 views for a minute.
I’m very confused about what the metrics mean. Most of your posts take way more than 10 seconds to read.
@stephanie – The data shown indicate visits to the site, not the RSS feeds (I see those stats in FeedBurner). You’re right, it takes more than 10 seconds to read a post.
What the data show is that most people don’t actually read anything. They glance and then leave.
If you look at Nielsen NetRatings, you’ll see that people spend less than a minute, on average, on each Web page they visit. This is an average — sure, sometimes you spend 5 minutes on one page.
The average means that most of the time, we barely even look at any page we open. I know this is true for me — so I find it easy to believe other people use the Web the same way.