Are too many of your visitors closing browser or hitting 'back'?

[coburn]

One of my sites (business training) shows that 70% of visitors spend less than 30 seconds on the site. Another 10% last no more than 2 mins.

What visitor times are you achieving, and what have you done to keep their eyeballs reading and fingers clicking for longer?

[Receptional]

Hugely variable in my experience. 70% sounds high, but I have a client site in the same field with a similar bounce rate. Can't figure out for the life of me why (not that they are paying me to do anything about it). Then again, I looked at a site today which I assumed would have a bounce rate of 99% but it is around 23%.

Go figure.

[larryn]

coburn,

Are you tracking when the page is unloaded from the browser? If not, then the 30 seconds is really how long they look at the page before make a request for the next page/image/swf/etc.

Tracking the unload requires Javascript, and many browsers tend to disable onload and unload events to avoid pop-ups. If you have well-working way to track them, I'd be very interested.

Personally, single view hit & run visits should be separated from other visits, as they have less data and are a group that you can investigate further - look at the keywords that resulted in a Hit & Run, how many were not actually appropriate for you site? The rest are the ones you want to figure out why they didn't stick.

As to the length of viewing that first page, look at where they went next. 30 seconds might be all it take to find a big appropriate link when scanning a page for something you are looking to find.

Larry

[coburn]

Hi Dixon and Larry.

Larry: am using Awstats, reporting "visits duration" - so don't know if it's tracking the page, thought it was the site. Am about to get G Analytics up, expect it'll be better. If neither show total visits, then will have to have coder do some database page request handiwork, plus perhaps cookies and session coding.