[Sigia-l] Less than one-minute visits

[Joe 10]

Length of site visits are one of those unfortunate metrics which can 
either indicate that the site is doing its job very well or very 
poorly. Without multidimensional analysis or some direct observation 
it's a pretty shallow indicator of overall site quality.

For instance, This morning I was trying to remember the name of a 
guiding body for the IA trade with the name of an obscure street in 
its name. I could have done a search in Eudora for "Derick" and a few 
vehement terms, or I could have Googled the names of some prominent 
practitioners. Instead I went to Elegant Hack, clicked her blog's IA 
category and scanned until I saw a link which looked right. All told 
about 30-45 seconds. Sounds like success.

On the other hand, it can indicate a mismatch of expectation and 
actual content, which may or may not be a fault of the Web site. 
People looking for a particular resource move quickly from ones which 
just sort of fit, but if the content is well targeted, then those 
people who hit and run aren't the market anyway.

It's also not inconsolable that the site sux ;-)

HTH,
/Joe

At 11:55 AM -0500 3/26/03, Matthew Rehkopf wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>Reviewing the reports of a new client's website, I found that for one week
>almost 75% of visitors were on the site for less than one minute! Have any
>of you see such stats before? What could this be attributed to? Internal
>employees marking the site as their homepage? Length of homepage download
>too long? Error/miscalculations in the reporting? The client is using basic
>WebTrends for reporting.
>
>Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
>
>
>Matthew Rehkopf
>Information Architect
>Thread Inc.
>

-- 

Joe Tennis
Information Design Honcho
Joe 10 Group
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