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'sticky' tracker - time spent on website
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| socal 2006-08-15, 10:37 pm |
| can anyone recommend a tool that has this feature. I use Analog for
general stats, but it doesn't track this and I was asked by my manager
if it could be done. Thanks.
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| Mark Parnell 2006-08-15, 10:37 pm |
| Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, socal
<dh50@yahoo.com> declared in alt.www.webmaster:
> I was asked by my manager if it could be done.
Then tell them the answer is no. You have no way of knowing how long
someone spends on your site.
--
Mark Parnell
My Usenet is improved; yours could be too:
http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html
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| socal 2006-08-15, 10:37 pm |
| Mark Parnell wrote:
> Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, socal
> <dh50@yahoo.com> declared in alt.www.webmaster:
>
>
> Then tell them the answer is no. You have no way of knowing how long
> someone spends on your site.
>
Are you sure? Maybe I should have said average time spent on a website.
I remember hearing some websites tout the average time spent on their site.
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| Mark Parnell 2006-08-15, 10:37 pm |
| Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, socal
<dh50@yahoo.com> declared in alt.www.webmaster:
> Are you sure?
Yes.
> Maybe I should have said average time spent on a website.
> I remember hearing some websites tout the average time spent on their site.
They're making it up. The only way to get any idea of that would be to
implement some sort of Javascript trickery (which won't work at all for
anyone with Javascript disabled/unavailable), but even then how do you
know they're actually looking at your site the whole time? They might be
looking at another site in a different tab/window with yours open in the
background. They might walk away from their desk for a couple of hours
with your site still open - how are you going to find that out?
--
Mark Parnell
My Usenet is improved; yours could be too:
http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html
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| Mark Parnell wrote:
> Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, socal
> <dh50@yahoo.com> declared in alt.www.webmaster:
>
>
> Yes.
>
>
> They're making it up. The only way to get any idea of that would be to
> implement some sort of Javascript trickery (which won't work at all
> for anyone with Javascript disabled/unavailable),
Which will give you the average of js-users on your site. Not at all bad I'd
think. Average time spent on site can never be anything else then an
estimate.
> but even then how
> do you
> know they're actually looking at your site the whole time? They might
> be looking at another site in a different tab/window with yours open
> in the background. They might walk away from their desk for a couple
> of hours
> with your site still open - how are you going to find that out?
On a website consisting of a lot of smaller pages, one could take a
pagerefresh/new page request within a certain arbitrary amount of time as a
hint the user has been there reading all this time. It's hardly reliable
though.
To make the data mean anything you'd have to perform some serious
statistical analysis on it, accounting for the formentioned eventuality and
more. And even then it remains a very rough estimate.
Then again, as long as you can convince buyers your software will keep exact
track of this, and they buy it, word gets out and people will think it's
possible. They'll pay your for your rough estimates which may be completely
off.
It's not there with selling javascript obfuscators, but it's close.
Grtz,
--
Rik Wasmus
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| Mark Goodge 2006-08-16, 6:57 am |
| On Wed, 16 Aug 2006 02:14:55 +0200, Rik put finger to keyboard and
typed:
>Mark Parnell wrote:
>
>To make the data mean anything you'd have to perform some serious
>statistical analysis on it, accounting for the formentioned eventuality and
>more. And even then it remains a very rough estimate.
>
>Then again, as long as you can convince buyers your software will keep exact
>track of this, and they buy it, word gets out and people will think it's
>possible. They'll pay your for your rough estimates which may be completely
>off.
>
>It's not there with selling javascript obfuscators, but it's close.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with a rough estimate, so long as
you're aware that it's a rough estimate. An accurate, albeit rough,
estimate can actually be very useful. If, for example, I want to know
when my car will be fixed then "sometime next week" is an extremely
rough estimate but it's still very useful knowledge so long as it's
accurate. On the other hand, telling me it will be ready at 3:45pm on
Wednesday is no use at all if it's actually ready at 11.05am on
Thursday - too much precision can be a bad thing, sometimes. Equally,
with web stats, a figure for "visits" (one of the most common
marketing tools) of 12,459 is precise but almost certainly wrong,
while a figure of "somewhere just over 10,000" is imprecise but much
more likely to be accurate. The problem with most stats packages is
that their users (and creators) tend not to appreciate the difference
between accuracy and precision, and thus present imprecise figures as
if they were precise.
Mark
--
Visit: http://www.ukcommunityradio.info - Community Radio in the UK
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| Phil Payne 2006-08-16, 6:40 pm |
| > can anyone recommend a tool that has this feature. I use Analog for
> general stats, but it doesn't track this and I was asked by my manager
> if it could be done. Thanks.
It's a completely meaningless datum. I often work with half a dozen
browser windows open at one time and I'm still theoretically "on" all
of the websites.
I'm often "on" - in this context - the W3 HTML Validator ten hours a
day.
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| On Tue, 15 Aug 2006 23:02:44 GMT, socal <dh50@yahoo.com> wrote:
>can anyone recommend a tool that has this feature. I use Analog for
>general stats, but it doesn't track this and I was asked by my manager
>if it could be done. Thanks.
Awstats reports "Visits duration". Don't know what it's based on.
Sig
--
http://koiclubsandiego.org/comment?r=8
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