[Sigia-l] Less than one-minute visits

[Anne Hjortshoj]

Something that seems to happen a lot is that people look at a site to do a
quick evaluation (to eliminate a company from a list of possible vendors,
for example), then return later to look in more detail.

Perhaps this is what's happening.

Also: a minute is longer than you might think. It's adequate time for a user
to scan quite a few pages, if not to do in-depth reading. It might be a
useful exercise for you to observe some users, and time their visits to the
site. I think you might be surprised at how much they accomplish in the
space of a minute.

-A

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Rehkopf" <matt.rehkopf at experiencethread.com>
To: "'John O'Donovan-INTERNET'" <john.odonovan at bbc.co.uk>; "Anne Hjortshoj"
<anne at mindstorm.com>; "Matthew Rehkopf" <matt.rehkopf at experiencethread.com>;
"Sigia (E-mail)" <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2003 11:05 AM
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] Less than one-minute visits


> "Is it possible to say which site this is? I understand this may not be
> possible... What type of content is the site trying to provide and how
long
> do you think they *should* be staying..."
>
> Sorry, John, I cannot divulge the site, but I will try to provide more
info.
> It is a basic marketing site for a services company. The site contains
> descriptions of the services, case studies, info on the company, as well
as
> white papers and articles. Given that the site's goals are lead generation
> as well as a knowledge resource, I would expect the majority of visitors
to
> be either viewing the company info/services/case studies (3-10 minutes) or
> reading the white papers (10+ minutes). At the moment, the breakdown looks
> like:
>
> 75% of visitors stayed for less than one minute
> 9% of visitors stayed for between 1 - 4 minutes
> 8% of visitors stayed for between 4 - 19 minutes
> 7% of visitors stayed for more than 20 minutes
>
> The 7% group are likely reading the articles, and the 9% and 8% are likely
> also sifting through the site. But what can you do on a site in one
minute?
>
> I conducted a quick survey on the hunch that employees have this site set
as
> their homepage, possibly explaining the short stay. The results showed
this
> not to be the case.
>
> I also wonder if it is always possible to track the amount of time a user
is
> on the site. Perhaps WebTrends, or the server, was not able to determine
> visit length and assigned it a value of 0. This is my working hypothesis
at
> the moment.
>
>
> Matt
>