Website Statistics Report: Visit Length
Overview
The visit length report shows how long visitors spend looking at your site. This is calculated by taking the time they looked at the first page to the time the last page request was made.
The visit length report works by grouping each website visitor session into one of seven brackets:
- Visitors who spent less than one minute looking at the website
- Visitors who spent one to five minutes looking at the website
- Visitors who spent five to ten minutes looking at the website
- Visitors who spent ten to twenty minutes looking at the website
- Visitors who spent twenty to forty minutes looking at the website
- Visitors who spent forty to sixty minutes looking at the website
- Visitors who spent over sixty minutes looking at the website
Depending on the type of website you run of course, it is probably true that the longer your visitors spending looking at your website the better. The visit length report is designed to help you measure the effectiveness of any work you do aimed at increasing the average visit length.
As with most reports you can vary the date range this report runs from by selecting either one of the preset values or by selecting a custom date range using the date selectors.
The visit length report is split into two sections.
Summary Data
The first section shows the totals and percentages for each timing group for the duration of the reports date range, as set by you in the report date range selector.
The visit length data in this section is data table and also a pie a graph, shown below:
Website Statistics, Visit Length pie chart
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Weekly Trend
The second section, added in July 2007, shows the values for each grouping changes over time. At the time of writing this is a new style of report for WebVisitor.info and is one we are planning to add to some of the other reports in time, so watch this space!
This web statistics report works by taking snapshot of the visit length data on a week-by-week basis and rendering it to a line graph. This highlights trends that are developing in your websites visit length statistics.
An example of the graph for this report is shown below:
Website Statistics, Visit Length Trends
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From this example you can see that the “Less than one minute” category is clearly the most popular; however the “One to five minutes” visit length category is increasing. This is good news for the owners of this particular website as it shows that work they are doing on the content of the site is paying of and visitors are spending more and more time per visit.
Report Generation and Free Accounts
This report takes a snapshot of your visitor traffic per week and so updates once a week with the previous weeks traffic information.
Because of the amount of data-crunching that is required to produce this report the results are cached. This is necessary to keep the report running smoothly but also takes up space in our database.
Due to this if you are running with a Free Account this report will only show data for the past 3 months.
If your websites receives a lot of traffic and is running with a full log it may be possible that this report cannot work as you will only have data for the last few days.
Records older than this will have been deleted to make room for new log entries.
If you wish to make full use of this report then subscribe to any of the upgrade options (Company Account > Account Services) and this section of the visit length report will run with no limits and allow you to analyse visit length trends over much larger date ranges.
How this Report Works with the Log
Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record with each new visitor so increasing the log size to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.
If you are performing optimisations to your website that are aimed at increasing the average visit length make sure you have enough log space to store both historical data and sufficient new data to put your optimisations to the test.
To understand how to get best use of this report read
Managing Website Session Log help document.
Optimising your site for this Report
This report requires no special treatment to get the best out of it other than the standard bullet points of …
- Ensure that the tracking code is placed on every page of your site
- Ensure that your log is as big as possible.