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There is a little used site statistic that tells you a lot about your site. It is called "Visits Duration" and it is included in your stats package. Visits duration tells you how long people stay on your site.
Why is Visit Duration important?
One of the limitations of Web Marketing is we place total emphasis on traffic. What we really want is sales! If someone hits your site by mistake (and backs out in an instant) that counts as a unique visitor. If someone looks you over carefully for a half hour, that counts as a unique visitor too. From the perspective of traffic, they count exactly the same. They're not the same at all.
If you look at our (internetman.com) visit duration for example, 71 percent of the visitors are on the site for 30 seconds or less. In other words, fully three quarters of the people hit the back button immediately without reading a thing.
That's the bad news. The good news is of the remaining quarter, over one half of them are on the site over 15 minutes. Six percent are on the site for over an hour. Our average visit duration is 8 minutes and that's not too bad.
In terms of sales, visit duration is more important than traffic. What good is traffic if no one stays on the site? A high visit duration means people are interested in what you have to offer. It verifies your site is effective - that you're hooking them in. Increase visit duration and you'll increase sales, with or without an increase in traffic.
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