Understanding Website Analytics Data
I’ve recently finished a project. It’s a website for a wedding gown boutique. The main function of the website is to show their products, just like a of photo gallery. There are loads of photos and I tracked every photo’s page view. While I was happily looking through the numbers in Google analytics I realise the page view duration is a very good indication of how good or popular the product is. People will stare at a photo longer if they like it and if they don’t like it they’ll quickly click at the next button. I feel this is very useful information to engage the customers’ taste.
UPDATE: as @ickydime mentioned, the tracking data is not 100% accurate. There are cases that users leave the window open, go to do something else and come back to their desks again, recording a very long page view duration. And there are also users accidentally closed the page, clicked away or some other stuff, which record very short page view duration. But all these inaccuracy will be minimised when more data is collected, the errors will be averaged with a big base. Based on the tracking data, no exact figure can be given, such as 53.4% users like product A. But the data can definitely tell that a product with average 30 seconds page view duration is more popular than a product with average 5 seconds page view duration.
I’ve always found the time on page to be somewhat misleading. It seems as though it only works if the user goes from that page to another page on your site. If they bounce from the site it will read as 0 seconds on the page, even if they stayed for 10 minutes before they left.
Also, I don’t think it can keep track of whether or not the user is actually paying attention to that page/tab. If they open a new tab or just start to work on something else it will register as though they are on that page for a long time, even though they may not be paying attention to it.