Average Time Spent on Site

This report shows how much time visitors spend on your site.

The way this is determined is by summing up the time difference when a visitor navigates from one page with the tracking script on it to another page with the tracking script on it.

However, this report does not include the amount of time a visitor spends on the last page they view.  Since browsing the web does not notify the web server when you leave a page, it is impossible to tell whether a user left the site, shut down the browser, or otherwise exited without the visitor going to another page on the site with the tracking script on it.  Therefore the following rules apply:

1) A visitor that visits a single page is recorded as "< 1" minute (since the web does not report when the visitor leaves that page).
2) A visitor that visits more than one page is recorded as the total time it took to go between the pages, except the last page.

For example, a user that navigates from pages A to B to C:

From A -> B takes three minutes.
From B -> C takes four minutes.
The user stays on page C for five minutes.

This would be recorded as seven minutes, since the time on page C is not considered (since it is not reported to the web server).

Terms Used on Report:

Visitors

Also referred to as a 'Unique Visitor'.  By default, this value represents a visitor that comes to your site for the first time in a day.  All subsequest visits during the day by the visitor are not considered unique.

The definition of a visitor can be customized.  You can set a custom period of inactivity that will cause the next access of the visitor to be considered a new visit.  The visit definition screen can be found on the 'Setup' menu.

This differs from a page view or hit in that a single visitor can have one visit per day but many page views during a visit.