Amount of time visitors stay

How long do visitors typically stay on an e-commerce website?

[gannawdm]

Hi,

According to my AWSTATS, about 65% of my visitors stay on my website for 30 seconds or less. It has remained the same for nearly a year. I have changed my front page multiple times assuming that was the problem, but the percentage has changed little.

Is this typical of most e-commerce websites? I'm interested to know what kind of website you have and what percentage of people stay for 30 seconds or less.

davidg

[Essex_boy]

7 minutes is the average according internetretailer.com with customers loking at an average 150 products.

If they are staying 30 seconds, I guess your sites to slow.

[dickbaker]

My site isn't an ecommerce site, more of an informational directory site.

58% of visitors stay for less than 30 seconds. The average visit is 216 seconds.

Don't know if that's good or bad.

[Wael_Ghonim]

You can implement a very simple survey that pops up with 3 to 4 reasons to checkout why those people leave within 30 seconds.

I personally think its either a mistake from your traffic analyzer software, or that you are doing POP UP campaigns in other websites that gets people to your homepage without their desire.

There are lot of sites that offer this survey feature. Let me know if you need more help.

[gannawdm]

I thought about the popup survey, but I don't want to piss off anybody and I figure there are a lot of popup blockers out there.

I get only about 115 visits a day. Over the past year, I have changed my design quite a bit, but the breakdown of how long my visitors are spending on my site are VERY close every month.

0s-30s ....about 65%
30s-2mn ...about 17%
2mn-5mn ...about 7%
5mn-15mn ...about 5%
15mn-30mn ...about 3%
30mn-1h ...about 2%
over 1 hr....about 1%

Below is our site:
<snip>

It's a retail site without a lot of content. I figure that 65% just go to our site, check out the jewelry and don't like it. Do you think this might be the case?

Check out my design and tell me if you think it is a design problem that isn't leading people deeper into my site. Of course, as I said, I have changed my design several times using a variety of styles, so I would think the percentage of 30sec visitors would change. That's one reason I might suspect that AWSTATS is faulty, but who knows.

Let me know what you think.

[edited by: Woz at 5:15 am (utc) on April 30, 2005]
[edit reason] No self URLs please, see TOS#13 [/edit]

[schwartz]

I would def put "add to cart" or "buy now" links on items at top-level:

[edited by: Woz at 5:21 am (utc) on April 30, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLs please, see Tos#13 [/edit]

[mdean]

Hmmmmm. Ganna, I use Awstats too and your numbers look about exactly the same as mine. That's scary.

[keyplyr]

According to my AWSTATS, about 65% of my visitors stay on my website for 30 seconds or less

Most likely bots, link-checking software, head requests, etc are being included in this figure. See if you can find some customization to filter these results or get a different stats program.

[TheDoctor]

From your figures, it sems that you are getting 12 or 13 people every day spending five minutes or more - sometimes substantially more - on your site.

Sounds like these people want to buy from you.

How many of them are you selling to? If you're not selling anything to someone who spends 15 minutes looking at what you're offering, then you should be looking a bit more closely at the design of your site. At the very least, take schwartz's sugestion seriously.

Once you start to sell to the stayers, then you can start thinking about how to increase their number.

[hannamyluv]

There was a presentation done by Eyetools a few months ago that said about the same thing. People flip in and if they don't immediately see what they are looking for they hit the back button.

The eyetools presentation was nice as they gave information on how to reduce this. Things like placing important words near images and that sort of thing.

[Vetteman]

This sounds like my experience with Awstats as well. Except for me it says that 75% of visitors stay less than 30 seconds.

I'm now using Summary, and I can filter out bots, avoid using non html files to count unique ip's, and filter out my on ip.

Summary indicates that my average visitor stays 7 minutes and 50 seconds.

I'll tend to side with Summary because it eliminates robots popping in an out of my site. What do you guys think?

[Raymond]

It has alot to do with the quality of your incoming traffic. You might also want to check your search engine traffic to see if your site have the content those 30 seconds visitors were looking for.