March 25, 2010
Google Analytics Average Page View Time = 0.00 – What Does This Mean?

Today, I had a question come up and all parties involved were having trouble answering: What does it mean when a page in Google Analytics is noted as having an average page view time of 0.00 seconds? I posted this question to colleagues at Philly Startup Leaders and thanks to Jake Stein of RJ Metrics, an answer came through in a matter of seconds!

Question:

I’m sure many of you are using Google Analytics for your Websites, or Websites that you build. We use it for most all Website we build. Great tool. Here’s a question we’ve been asked and are having trouble answering. We’ve contacted “the experts” on this, and even they are unsure.
On an ecommerce site, we have a page that gets personalized to the user. This page creates a unique URL (sort of like a PURL, but without any human readable personalization). Google Analytics tracks each and every one of these personalized pages, as if it were a unique page. This is precisely what we wanted Google to go. On some of these personalized pages, Google is showing Average Time on Page = 0.00 seconds, with others varying anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes.
We asked the experts, does Average Time on Page = 0.00 seconds mean that the user has abandoned the page (closed the window, navigated to another site, whatever) BEFORE the page had finished loading? That is, if they were waiting for their personalized page to appear and got tired of waiting and closed the window, would Google record this as 0.00 seconds on page?
Their response was, “No, not necessarily. It could (potentially) mean that the user spent some time on that page poking around, then abandoned it later.”
And so my questions is, does anyone really know for sure?… If Google records 0.00 seconds on a page, does that mean the user abandoned the page before it fully loaded?… or could it mean that they spent time on that page (some indeterminate amount) and then abandoned the site?

I’m sure many of you are using Google Analytics for your Websites, or Websites that you build. We use it for most all Website we build. Great tool. Here’s a question we’ve been asked and are having trouble answering. We’ve contacted “the experts” on this, and even they are unsure.

On an ecommerce site, we have a page that gets personalized to the user. This page creates a unique URL (sort of like a PURL, but without any human readable personalization). Google Analytics tracks each and every one of these personalized pages, as if it were a unique page. This is precisely what we wanted Google to go. On some of these personalized pages, Google is showing Average Time on Page = 0.00 seconds, with others varying anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes.

We asked the experts, does Average Time on Page = 0.00 seconds mean that the user has abandoned the page (closed the window, navigated to another site, whatever) BEFORE the page had finished loading? That is, if they were waiting for their personalized page to appear and got tired of waiting and closed the window, would Google record this as 0.00 seconds on page?

Their response was, “No, not necessarily. It could (potentially) mean that the user spent some time on that page poking around, then abandoned it later.”

And so my questions is, does anyone really know for sure?… If Google records 0.00 seconds on a page, does that mean the user abandoned the page before it fully loaded?… or could it mean that they spent time on that page (some indeterminate amount) and then abandoned the site?

Answer:

Zero seconds can also mean that they spent a bunch of time on that one page, but there was no second page visit.  GA needs at least 2 visits to calculate time on site, so they can do a date diff of the timestamps.  See more detail here: http://www.onlinemarketingperformance.com/analytics-time_on_site-bounce/

Thanks again to Jake for this helpful tip!