Maybe one of you bright souls out there can help me to understand something. Often, when I look at the administrative panel for the tracking software for this blog, I see that a visitor has spent zero seconds viewing one or more pages. How is this possible?
I know from my own experiences that, when I'm blog surfing, it takes more than one second for me to decide if I want to stay on someone's blog or not. Even on those few occasions when I unfortunately happen upon a racist or porno site, it takes me more than one second to close the tab or move on to the next blog.
This situation is even more perplexing to me when the stats show someone has viewed two or more pages and yet the length of visit is still zero seconds. What does this mean?
I know from my own experiences that, when I'm blog surfing, it takes more than one second for me to decide if I want to stay on someone's blog or not. Even on those few occasions when I unfortunately happen upon a racist or porno site, it takes me more than one second to close the tab or move on to the next blog.
This situation is even more perplexing to me when the stats show someone has viewed two or more pages and yet the length of visit is still zero seconds. What does this mean?
Search engine robots and other such scripts do not need to load a page in the slow visual way we do. Just a flash and it is read.
ReplyDeleteBut these can't ALL be bots and scripts. Some of them are folks I know.
ReplyDelete"Free" tracking software programs, such as those offered by statcounter and sitemeter, are not totally accurate. And some people use a "web proxy" that allow them to surf the web anonymously. The level of anonymity varies from one proxy service to the next. Some hide (or falsify) the IP address, city/location, clicks, and length of visit, while still registering the visit, perhaps showing up as 0 seconds, while other more powerful proxies may hide everything (depending on the quality of your tracking software), so that you may receive a comment from someone at a certain time, but there may be no trace of the visit on your tracking software.
ReplyDeleteRT, I usually read your blog, using the RSS feed, in Google Reader. Could that be the cause. I know that many people use RSS feeds.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the google reader thing too. Sometimes I quickly click on an item which I already read but it hadn't marked it as read. I don't know how google reader shows up in metrics though.
ReplyDelete('zero seconds' is 'a' second, right?. Sorry, I've never been good in math.^^)
ReplyDelete:S