Visitor Attention Span

Do some people just read faster?

[Mike_Mackin]

We work on a site where the index page is content rich.
The following stats interest me regarding visitor duration. [listed in order of traffic for 1st week of 2001]

Yahoo 1 minute, 41 seconds
google 47 seconds
aol 19 seconds
msn 1 second [ya that's 1 second]
epilot 1 minute, 42 seconds
looksmart 1 minute, 49 seconds

anyone?

[mivox]

I can think of many times I've clicked on a link, and as soon as I saw the index page, I knew it wasn't what I was looking for. On the other hand, I can think of times it wasn't what I was looking for, but was curious enough to look at it anyway...

I'd say, apparently MSN doesn't attract the demographic group your site appeals to. AOL doesn't either, but it takes the AOL users longer to figure it out...

I'm skeptical of visit duration stats, myself... I often follow a link off a site opening the link in a new window (in case I want to go back quickly), and spend a while browsing the new window... sometimes I don't go back to the first site except to close it... and their stats would potentially show me looking at their site the whole time. (Wow! a 30 minute visit! that person must be REALLY interested!)

[tedster]

Fascinating numbers -- such an extreme swing! On the surface of it, it looks like you don't need to worry about you aol and msn rankings very much!

But to this mathemematician's mind, something is suspect in these results. Are they really comparing apples to apples? Is the sample big enough to be statistically significant? I mean, 1 second?

I'd look at the methodology very closely before using these numbers to influence actions. I can accept that AOL or MSN people might boggle more frequently at a content rich page, but this swing looks too extreme to me.

[msgraph]

What type of rich content do you have?

I'd imagine the AOL users couldn't hack the lag from all the junk their software has running.

[Mike_Mackin]

244 words + links
[some are BIG words]
;)

[NFFC]

>aol 19 seconds

Would that be an average of genuine users and proxy hits. The proxies would certainly bring the average way down.

[msgraph]

Then quoting rcjordan's term of "some" users being "web-challenged", I'd say they couldn't comprehend that many words.

I'm surprised at the Google number. Most users I get across many sites stay longer than anyone else.

[Mike_Mackin]

>Would that be an average of genuine users and proxy hits. The proxies would certainly bring the average way down.

Well THAT explains THAT
One aol user was on the SITE for 32 minutes. lol

[Drastic]

Mike, what kind of stats prog are you using? I would love to see my visit time broken down by referrer.

Also, on the one second visits. Wouldn't that be when a visitor only requests one page? Since you only know when requests are made, a person could check your page for a few minutes and then surf on, or click an outbound link on your page. They were actually there for a few minutes, but since they only made one html request, it appears the visit was one second.

[Mike_Mackin]

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