Hacker News Reader

Comment by lenazegher | Hacker News Reader

These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

View on HN

I`ve checked how it works with "Real-Time" option of the Google Analytics. When i closed a tab Google Analytics knew that i stopped reading the page (the on-line user counter was updated -1). Maybe it works different with a standard report (i didn`t read the code), but maybe not? They could use javascript browser events detection and i don`t think such a bug would remain unseen.

Are you absolutely sure this is how it works? I have a 1 page website where the average time is 1:36, shouldn't it stay at 0 since the users are not clicking to other pageS?

My guess is that a small percentage of users refresh the page after a while (if the traffic is small, maybe you're weighing in on that yourself)

But does anyone actually know? I can see from this thread that plenty of people thought they knew, but it seems nearly half thought it worked one way, and nearly half thought it worked the other way.

Reasonably sure, unless I'm misinterpreting something: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1006253?hl=en

I`ve read that doc, and it looks like you are right. Now i`m even more courious how they measure single hit reading time.

What is your pages per visit number?

Before changing the site to a multiple page site, I was averaging 1.2 pages/visit. Again with a 1 page site, but I would develop on the server so I figured GA was picking that up. Since changing to a multiple page site my pages/vist is 2.55 and my average time on site has increased by like 20 seconds, which seems a lot. Maybe people are on 56k, haha.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting something, but the way I understand it, the last (or only) page of a website is handled differently. If it's a single page website with a demo download, and someone downloads the demo, then the time between pageload and the download would be counted. If there's a Flash movie, the time between loading the page and playing the movie would be counted. It also looks like you can come up with your own custom events to track, maybe like clicking an outgoing link?

I've never seriously used GA so take my interpretation with a basketball-sized grain of salt.

I apologise for my naive misunderstanding of the Analytics metric. I've updated the post to point this out at the top of my post. Thanks for the explanation!

Exactly what I came here to say. Those people could have spent 10 hours really absorbing that one article and their time would have still been recorded as 0 seconds.

The time on site is calculated as the time on the last page hit (or engagement hit) minus the time of the first page hit.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1006253?hl=en

> Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages.

Source?

They may be using JavaScript to track that more accurately.

what if i told you they use the onUnload event?

Do they?

do they?

they track heatmaps might as well count that + 100 other hacks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com