One page visits & time on site?

[Sand]

Is it possible to configure Google Analytics to show time on site for single page visits? I'm assuming that it can only count time on site as an on load event when a user moves from one page to another (calculated by subtracting the current time from the time of the initial pageview), but wonder if there's some trickery to make it behave otherwise.

I have a site with a high bounce rate (it's just the nature of the content), and I have absolutely no idea how much time people are actually spending on my content pages when they are entry pages. It makes it really hard to make meaningful adjustments to the content.

The site in question is not trying to drive any conversions, and there are no success events to measure. I'm just trying to make it as useful and engaging as possible.

[cgrantski]

You're right about how GA does it.

Some people write a script in the page code that fires the tracking tag every few seconds, adding a parameter or something similar to keep track of the number of seconds. With Google Analytics I'm not sure the analysis would be all that easy; I have never used GA with this method. I use WebTrends which has more power when dealing with parameters that have numeric values.

It will throw off your page count. In WebTrends, I filter these out of the main profile and have a separate profile just for this landing page timer. I'm not sure how you'd do it, or if you can do it, in GA. Maybe somebody else will have an idea.

[haqy]

Use statcounter and watch everything about your site.

[lucy24]

Same problem in piwik. Would there be a problem with throwing in an extra bit of js that runs on page unload? I've thought of it periodically but worried that I'm overlooking something stupid and obvious.

[Mark12]

I use Onelytics. It will display a list of visits, will see the details of each visitor and much more.

[edited by: mademetop at 5:37 am (utc) on Jul 25, 2012]
[edit reason] No links please. [/edit]

[cgrantski]

Eh ... Statcounter and Onelytics don't do this. What do you mean, haqy and Mark12?