a follow upon how long people stay on your site

how many pages do they look at? carts excluded!

[stuartmcdonald]

what's a good number of pages for people to look at - our site is 90% content with a small bit of affiliate and other misc stuff - mostly content (travel stuff - things to see/do/drink/sleep on etc) - 16 pages a visit on average (increaing as I add content).

Any comments from other content sites?

[spharalsia]

An average of 16 pages sounds very good to me -- we're nowhere near that for our travel site. But I'd suspect the number of pages would have a lot to do with the way the site is structured. Is the whole site about one destination, with information spread out over a lot of pages?

[stuartmcdonald]

yes its three countries (within SE Asia) and is broken down into a lot of smallish pages - eg country->region->province->location-> then listings (accommodation, restaurants, activities and so on) so a US example would be something like:

USA->California->LA->Venice Beach->Places to eat ... etc etc

I should have mentioned something about structure in the lead post - no doubt makes it difficult to generalise

[dickbaker]

I'm getting an average of 6.5 page views per visit. Of course, my site isn't in the SE indexes far enough for people who are looking for the content to find the site.

Sixteen page views seems very good.

[webdiversity]

The thing to bear in mind is page views could be a good or bad metric.

If your site is poorly structured or your pages have a hideous breadcrumb trail then 16 might mean you have visitors who found it difficult to find their way around but who perservered anyway....

But it might be that 16 is a genuine figure.

All data needs to be taken with some salt.