PPC Visitors spend 0 time on site

referred by ppc campaign with apparent real browser

[joethejoe]

I have a new log report that is showing what appear to be browser based visitors who are referred by one of our ppc campaigns. I can even see the clicks in the ppc report.

However my report shows they left as soon as they arrived and spent 0 time.

Here is an example:

Customer Browser Ident: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060124 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Customer Name: Guest
Referred By: Direct Access / Bookmark
Landing Page: [edit by me] referred by a ppc campaign
Last Page Viewed: [edit by me] the campaign landing page
Time Arrived: 07/19/2006 03:54:22
Last Click: 07/19/2006 03:54:22
Time on Site: 0hrs 0mins 0 seconds
Number of Clicks: 1

Is this a human or a bot?

[cgrantski]

If you think they might be a 'bot because they spent 0 time on the page, that won't get you anywhere. They could have spent several minutes on the page, reading it carefully, and it still would have been reported as 0 time. This is because there was no second click. The only way a log-based (and most tag-based) analysis program knows how long somebody spent on a page is if there is another request to your site. The elapsed time between their request for the first page and a request for a second page (clicking) is the only way to measure the time spent on the first page. If there's no second page, there's no elapsed time period to measure, and most stats packages translate "no known time" into "0 time."

Hope this makes sense.

[joethejoe]

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Too bad their browser doesn't say, "goodbye."

Thanks for your quick response.

[cgrantski]

Yes, that "goodbye" would help a lot of us.

[gregbo]

The only way a log-based (and most tag-based) analysis program knows how long somebody spent on a page is if there is another request to your site. The elapsed time between their request for the first page and a request for a second page (clicking) is the only way to measure the time spent on the first page.

Actually, I would even argue that this doesn't measure the time spent on a page. It just measures the interval between requests, nothing more.

[aeiouy]

gregbo,

That is a good point. Sometimes I will open links to other parts of a site while still reading and keeping open the homepage, for example.