I have a question from my reader :

Hi,

I have a question about site duration. I recently had my site re-designed, and I also changed host and do the SEO thing. Before I had problems getting site stats (Thai company) I’ve noticed that about 50% of visitors only stay between 0-30 secs. Is that normal? Could it be a problem with my site downloading too slow?

Thanks

And my answer :

It depends on the stats package really… The one I use track bots and visitors separately. Generally a bot is there to do some indexing, so it wouldn’t show up for a short period of time like that.

While it is normal to have a fair percentage never get passed the home page, 50% does sound a little high.

Regardless of the length of time you’d want to try and have a Home Page retention rate of around 33%. That is to say that 66% stay on the site deeper than one page. Even at that - some one could scan a few pages in less than 30 seconds.

So I would watch the depth of the visits more than the actual timing. I’d do some split testing (even a basic one) on a fwe different Home page layouts to try and improve that number. I’d also look into the referrers to see where the traffic is coming from and if it is properly focused to bring in visitors that have the highest chance of retention and conversion.

What are you gathering stats with?

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