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How long is a visit? RRS feed

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    The new release of adCenter Analytics includes a Length of Visit metric as part of the Visitor Loyalty category. The buckets run from 0-10 seconds to 1801+ seconds. Length of Visit is a highly actionable metric for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns - was the campaign poorly targeted or the landing page unpersuasive? Two different issues with different solutions. I think the product team was spot-on by including it. My question is how the metric is determined if there's only a single page view for the session?

     

    Web analtyics typically measure duration by the time stamp between calls to the server. More than one page needs to be served in order to measure the duration between time stamps. The last page in a session isn't measured at all because it's, well, the last page. The session times out after 30 minutes or the visitor goes elsewhere. In either case, there's no further call to the server. So how do you measure a 10 second visit to only one page on the site?

     

    I suppose there are other solutions - maybe the server regularly pings the browser? I'm not clever enough to know all of the possibilities. Knowing how the data is derived, however, affects how I use that data.

     

    Cheers,

    Charles

    MicroMarketing

    Monday, March 3, 2008 4:23 PM

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    HI Charles,

     

    I have an answer to some extent.  From what I got from our engineering group.  Single PV visits are not supposed to be calculated in the length of visit report, nor is the last page visited, as we do not have a sure way of judging how long they spent on the page.  However, they register as a 0 second view, and currently register in the 0-10 second bucket.  There are plans to update the bucket to be 1 - 10 seconds and not include the single PV visits or last page visit.

     

    Hope this clears up your question.

     

    Brian

     

     

     

     

    Wednesday, March 5, 2008 10:21 PM

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    Hi Charles,

     

    Generally a short page view of a single page can be tracked by the Analytics technology, as we often refer to those type of visits as Bounces.  We can measure when someone leaves the page and heads to a different site, though I’d need to do some research on it to verify how.   I’ll see what I can find out and get back to you tomorrow.

     

    Brian

     

    Monday, March 3, 2008 7:15 PM
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    Brian, thanks for the prompt reply. When you're checking, can you find out whether single page view per session visits that time-out are part of the metric (included in the length of visit average) or excluded? And are you able to distinguish between visitors that navigate to another web page and those that simply hit their browser's back button?

     

    Thanks,

    Charles

    Monday, March 3, 2008 7:22 PM
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    Hi Charles,

     

    Just want to let you know I'm still waiting on a responce from Engineering on this.  I'll let you know as soon as I have an answer.

     

    Brian.

    Wednesday, March 5, 2008 3:52 PM
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    HI Charles,

     

    I have an answer to some extent.  From what I got from our engineering group.  Single PV visits are not supposed to be calculated in the length of visit report, nor is the last page visited, as we do not have a sure way of judging how long they spent on the page.  However, they register as a 0 second view, and currently register in the 0-10 second bucket.  There are plans to update the bucket to be 1 - 10 seconds and not include the single PV visits or last page visit.

     

    Hope this clears up your question.

     

    Brian

     

     

     

     

    Wednesday, March 5, 2008 10:21 PM
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    Brian, thanks for following up on this. It helps a lot to know how adCenter Analytics is defining their metrics. Even though the same metrics are used by numerous analytics solutions, they often have different defintions for those metrics, one reason why it's so hard to compare the values produced by different solutions.

     

    Cheers,

    Charles

    Saturday, March 8, 2008 5:13 PM
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    Brian, thanks for following up. It's helpful to know how adCenter Analytics is defining a common metric since definitions vary throughout the industry, one reason why it's so difficult to compare values produced for the same metric by different analytic solutions.

     

    Cheers,

    Charles

    Saturday, March 8, 2008 5:17 PM
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     Brian D. - MSFT wrote:

    HI Charles,

     

    I have an answer to some extent.  From what I got from our engineering group.  Single PV visits are not supposed to be calculated in the length of visit report, nor is the last page visited, as we do not have a sure way of judging how long they spent on the page.  However, they register as a 0 second view, and currently register in the 0-10 second bucket.  There are plans to update the bucket to be 1 - 10 seconds and not include the single PV visits or last page visit.

     

    Hope this clears up your question.

     

    Brian

     

     

     

     

    That is the same answer that I got a while back. It is very accurate response to your post.

    Sunday, March 9, 2008 4:48 AM
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    Thanks Brian for your info.

     

    Is there some place where I can find the list of "Duration buckets" or is it always in steps of 10 seconds?

     

    What happens with someone who stays in the same page for hours (left his computer)?

    Thanks!

     

     

     

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    Thursday, April 24, 2008 6:52 AM