
0 second visits according to Google Analytics - vidyesh
http://paweljaniak.co.za/2013/05/12/0-second-visits/
======
adventured
I believe this article is false.

I have a site that is extremely heavy on front page traffic. Basically 97% of
all traffic is front page traffic, and 75% of all traffic is single visit
(they hit the front page and nothing else). 55% of traffic does not generate
multiple page views on any given day.

I have absolutely no problem with Google reporting 0 second visits. In fact,
quite the opposite, Google reports very high visit durations, as visitors tend
to spend a lot of time on the front page and then leave. If there were a
problem with 0 second counting, it would decimate my time on site numbers due
to all the people not generating second page requests for GA to count.

I've been using Google Analytics since they purchased it, and have never run
into this problem (across millions of uniques and two dozen sites). The only
time I've ever seen 0 second requests on any scale, is from bots, and in that
case they're easy to out by looking at flash settings + browser version. If
you're seeing a huge number of 0 second requests, it's most likely a bot.

~~~
thauck
With all due respect that's a long time to use GA without understanding how it
works. Here's a good article by Google's GA evangelist I would highly
recommend to everybody in this thread who are throwing out anecdotes.

[http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google-
anal...](http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google-analytics-
time-calculations/)

~~~
lingben
Thanks, I think what most people, including adventured, do is to make an
assumption about GA and then forge ahead without ever checking it. The link
you posted was very illuminating.

Personally, this stresses the importance of measuring events or interactions
rather than time on a page. It would be nice to have both but if given the
choice, I'd rather have event/interaction data.

------
brokentone
A word of caution: make sure to set the "opt_noninteraction" flag in the event
tracking to "true" otherwise your bounce rate will be off.

[https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApiEventTracking)

------
belorn
Honest question here: Why do all this? If there are no secondary source of
data that one can observe (subscriptions, adclicks, citations, google link
scores...), then why spend so much time and energy on statistics?

~~~
RKearney
I'm not the OP, but I have my own personal blog and a lot of side projects I
make $0 money on (I don't use ads).

I use Analytics (Google Analytics, Woopra, GoSquared, and ChartBeat (although
never at the same time, that would be ridiculous)) for two main reasons.

1) I enjoy looking at analytical data. Something about charts and graphs just
intrigues me. Don't even get me started on the netflow statistics I monitor at
my job.

2) It's fun to see how many people are viewing my posts. When I get a post
that makes it to the front page of HN or Reddit and I get to see the hundreds
of thousands of hits my page gets, it gets me excited to keep posting.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think this captures it. Its a form of "score" for feedback on an activity,
and human nature is such that we like feedback.

------
simontabor
We get a lot of questions at GoSquared (<https://gosquared.com>) as to why
their engagement metrics (and visitor counts) are so different between GA and
GoSquared.

Pinging all visitors to check their still online is our solution, rather than
making a guess/estimate - this means that sometimes GA reports about 10
visitors online when there are actually more like 100.

This is especially true with HN posts where most people only visit the one
page and then leave.

Thanks for the great post :)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Does that mean GoSquared will report a page that has been open for days,
taking up a tab but not being actively looked at, as 'online', or is there a
timeout after a specific period of inactivity?

~~~
dangrossman
I don't know about GoSquared, but I built a similar real-time dashboard for
W3Counter [1] that operates the same way. It would include that visitor as
long as the tab is still open, but it also shows how many visitors are idle
versus writing or reading (recently scrolled or moved the mouse, which
requires the tab be in the foreground), so you know how many are just sitting
in tabs.

1: <http://www.w3counter.com/features/pro>

------
janesvilleseo
4th solution: GA breaks the segment of 0-10 into 0 (or N/A) and Greater than 0
- 10 Seconds

Problem solved.

The other proposed solutions do help to show engagement but requires more
knowledge of how to implement, this 4th solution helps to KISS

~~~
instakill
This is a very good solution. Anything more than 0, i.e. 0.05s would be
rounded up to 1s and 1 would always be the minimum for non-zero points.

------
danpalmer
Also, over a certain amount of traffic Google Analytics will just extrapolate
the numbers up rather than actually recording every visit.

If you don't want this to happen, there are plenty of other analytics services
out there. I'd recommend GoSquared, but I did work for them last year, so I'm
biased in that recommendation.

------
cjstewart88
From personal experience I used to be very discouraged that users spent
seconds on my site until I read up a bit more on why it was being reported
that way.

My fix was to "ping" GA with an event every 60 seconds. This results in about
55,000ish pings a day and has made my average time on site a little more like
something I'd expect off a music streaming website(<http://www.tubalr.com>).
My average time on Tubalr is around 1 hour with the new event tracking I'm
doing.

------
bsimpson
I'm surprised they don't have a timer running that pings themselves every N
seconds. The ads all do that. Pinging themselves on visibilitychange or
beforeunload could also be helpful (though there will always be people who
disconnect without warning, which is why you ping periodically if you care
about time spent as a metric).

------
lancedouglas
Great idea, but why do we require real-time and user-impacting statistics in
the first place?

Why not place a AJAX script to a local session monitor that stores up details
about a visit and flushes the results via hits to GA? That way, a user doesn't
have to wait for GA to load on a page (I've see it be the majority of load
time on many websites). The AJAX script could be tied to all types of events
such as mouse movement (people hover over links, images, ect. without clicking
so capture that as interactivity), onFocus events, and in future eye-tracking
events.

This could be built up as a off-screen buffer that generates a more detailed
session and fires it off to AG in near-real-time. One other important factor
could be to label the events in a concatenated nomenclature so that
home.hover, home.idle.30s, home.unFocus, home.gaze.rightMenu.17s, and
home.scroll.down.x143 all make sense.

------
shurcooL
Can I get some feedback on the following idea please:

\- Maintain an open (but idle) websocket connection on your page to have an
accurate real-time visitor information. The websocket should remain open as
long as the user doesn't close the tab or navigate away.

What are some cons that prevent everyone from doing so?

~~~
dhimes
I have many tabs open that I'm not actually "on." I just took a shower and
left HN open, for example. Can it detect that the tab is "active" or "focus?"
That may help. But I'm not sure this is a problem worth a ton of work. It's,
at best, a proxy for measuring things like interest.

~~~
bsimpson

        document.addEventListener('visibilitychange', onVisibilityChange);

------
bluesmoon
At lognormal/mPulse, we have boomerang set up to send a beacon on page load
and on page unload. The unload beacon tells us when someone has left the page.
If they go to a new page, the next load beacon overrides the previous unload,
else the unload tells us how long they stuck around.

It's been pretty reliable. All current browsers will make a GET request in the
onbeforeunload event (onunload in Opera). Firefox is the only one that blocks
the next page's load until a response is received, and Opera is the only other
browser that handles the response though it doesn't block while waiting for
it.

Our primary motivation is to measure session engagement (bounce rate,
conversion, duration, pages, etc.) versus average page load time across the
session.

------
pagealizer
This happens a lot with landing pages because many times there is no 2nd page
view as people don't convert. In landing pages this metric is super important.
If a person left after 5 seconds your page is probably ugly. If a person
leaves after 1min your content might not be convincing enough or no clear call
to action. You need to know when people usually leave your page in order to
know how to fix it. In <http://www.pagealizer.com/> we track the time spent on
page (beside other metrics) by pinging the visitor.

------
kzrdude
I block google analytics with noscript. No downside for me.

~~~
untog
Well, there's a downside in the sense that no-one will ever see how you use
web sites, so when they change their behaviour and break functionality you
used to use, you'll have no-one but yourself to blame.

~~~
hollerith
Is that the best argument you can make for why he should turn GA back on?

If so, I think I should block GA to reduce the length of the interval of
unresponsiveness while the "on load" JavaScript runs.

~~~
untog
What other argument can there possibly be? The benefits to the individual
aren't huge. And you're welcome to block GA, I'm just trying to make the point
that there _is_ a purpose behind analytics, and it isn't just a sinister
conspiracy to take over your life.

~~~
hollerith
I'm sympathetic to the purpose -- I'm less protective of privacy than most
here.

My objection is to the means, namely, giving the page's author essentially
unlimited access to compute resources on the browser and hoping the author
will choose to be moderate.

Until 2008 I browsed the web on a slow machine (Celeron based on a PIII core,
probably made in 2000 since the BIOS copyright notice referred to the year
2000) and blocking GA on that machine very drastically reduced the amount of
time the browser was unresponsive. So much so as to suggest that even on
modern fast hardware, there will probably be some improvement in
responsiveness even if the difference will not be immediately noticeable to
the user like it was on my old machine.

------
alexatkeplar
We added a page ping event into Snowplow for this exact reason. Tracking user
activity on the page, including where/when the user scrolls around the page,
yields a lot of interesting data, including average % of page read, by page:

[http://snowplowanalytics.com/blog/2013/04/18/measuring-
conte...](http://snowplowanalytics.com/blog/2013/04/18/measuring-content-page-
performance-with-snowplow/)

------
faxilux
I wonder why Google does not track the time to an event fired on another
Google Analytics site. While it might yield strange results if the user closes
the browser or opens a page without Google Analytics, it would provide quite
accurate results. Of course, this only works if most websites use GA.

Also, I am not a web developer, but is it not possible to specify another GA
event in the onbeforeunload function?

------
dhughes
What is a visit is it the search time or the time I am on the page?

I know I have searched for things that seem to take a long time (when I am in
a rush) but the results page show my search took e.g. 0.22 seconds when really
the page may have loaded slow or I had to reload the page taking maybe 30
seconds or Google Instant is being annoying.

~~~
dangrossman
That's the time Google spent preparing the result page for your search
(finding and sorting the matching results). Actual time between you making a
search and seeing that page involves much more than that computation, such as
network latency and time to transfer the HTML.

Did you read this submission? It's not about Google search results. It's about
how the time-on-site metric in Google Analytics is computed.

------
blablabla123
I'm coming to the conclusion it's best to write your own Analytics if you want
reliable and precise information. Google Analytics is an out-of-the box
solution targeted at websites between 1 and 1000000000... visitors per month.
(Regardless whether it's a blog, an online game or you name it.)

------
lifeformed
I feel like I'm missing something here. Surely you can get an accurate time
with some simple Javascript? There is the onbeforeunload event, and you could
always do polling.

------
edoceo
Time on page is a vanity metric. Actions are what you need to grow. Metrics
for pirates! Piwik is what I've been using, like it a bit more than GA

