Good Ranking Needs a Good Duration Time

The Question is: Do you and Google Analytics measure the duration time of your visitors correctly? If you have figures round about 1 and 2 minutes and less than 1.5 pageviews per visitor, something is definitely wrong with the measurement.

With this quick tip you can change it in only 5 minutes and your bounce rate will be reduced too. Another positive side effect: With a longer and official reported duration time you are more interesting for advertisers like Google AdSense or affiliate networks.

What is the problem with Google Analytics?

In same way Google Analytics tracks websites with the implemented gs.ja tracking code. With every page load the code is called and that is similar to the first click on the stopwatch. But if the visitor returns to the search engine result page directly after the first pageview, the code is not called a second time. Google Analytics does not get the information that the visitor left the website and the duration time will go to infinite. In this case Google Analytics reports a duration time of 0:00 minute for this page.

If your website is SEO-driven the most visitors will leave the website after one pageview and go back to the search engine result page by using the browser's back button. In this case you will have many pages with zero duration and that will distort the average session duration time of your website. But if you use a special type of Google Event Tracking you will see a dramatic increase of the reported session duration like in below picture.

Using the Google Event Tracking

Example of the event tracking code

* Note - in Wordpress, it just needs to be added in the footer to automatically set it for every page.

'Time' and 'Log' can be changed. If you want to specify every singular page then use 'Time Homepage' or 'Time Content' instead of 'Time' for the category. 'Log' is the name of the event action and also can be changed. If you want to check if it works shortly after the integration, go in Google Analytics to Real Time -> Events and have a look if you can see the event category. You can see a full report one day later in Behavior -> Events.

In general we recommend using the Google Event Tracking on time because the explained problem also exists on websites with two or more pageviews per visits. Whenever a visitor leaves the website the GA code will not be called and the last page always has 0:00 minutes duration time. The more pageviews, the less the impact is, but it always exists.