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Avg. Time per Visit – Standard definition
The Web Analytics Association (Jason Burby and co.) recently releases 26 Standard Definitions to Promote Consistency among us Vendors (PDF) – this is GREAT news and should make it much more straightforward to communicate web metrics among not only traditional report consumers, but also more experienced analysts! However we are not there yet …and please see this post as an inspiration to continue the splendid work. One of the standard definitions are “Visit Duration” – specifically described as follows: WAA Standard definition: Visit Duration Definition/Calculation The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session. Comments When there is only one piece of activity in a session (a single-page visit or singleevent visit), no visit duration is typically reported. This is a fine definition and one that I certainly agree on. BUT then comes questions on the subsequent metric that we could call “Visit Duration Average” – first question is what to name the metric and second question is on how to calculate the metric. Before concluding anything. Let us take a look at Google Analytics and IndexTools (because that is …