Microsoft Analytics includes a 'Length of Visit' report. The categories go from 0 to 10 and up to 1801+ seconds. But how reliable is this. I mean those trackers typically measure the length of time inbetween requests with the server. This of course can be done if more than one page is accesed, but what hapens if the visitor only stays on the landing page, reads it for 2 minutes and then leaves. In this case no time length can be recorded as no second request to the server has been made. So is there a way to measure the length of visit for just one page visits?

Does Microsoft Analytics (or Google) for instance check other sites to wich the user return whether or not the user has left the page it visited. Are visitors tracked through different sites as they browse. Please help me here as the length of stay is very important for my PPC campaigns.

Thanks,

Ka Pari

Good point, Kapari.

I'm trying to do something similar, tracking visitors while they do not move to another page. You could probably do something with Microsoft Analytics TrackEvent in their Javascript library. You might be able to call the function every 5 secends or so. This way you could track visitors eventhough they don;t do anything (like clicking on links).


Hope this helped.

j-L

I gues that Trackevent could be used for many things. I have yet to find a good tutorial on implementing these things for my blog. I'm not a coder and don't want to dive into that stuff.

Any info on a wordpress plugin that tracks everything or is easibly editable??

I don't know a good solution for this. Calling a certain Trackcode every 5 seconds sounds OK. On your other question about visitors being tracked through different websites:

Microsoft does offer autotracking, in wich case also outbound links and visit length to a single page are tracked. to implement this add the following line:

above the line:


in your tracking code (javscript).

hope this helped!

Tha't sounds like a solution!

Thanks!

I'm going to try this straight away, and I'll let you know if this works!

Great! Thanks

I'm going to try that too!

No problem, let me know how it worked!

Great tip!

To get back to that:
I did some digging around and found that MS indeed has no official way of tracking length of visits for 1 page visitors or for the last page visited.

They state that currently the 1 page visits fall in the 0 seconds category and thus are now shown as bounces instead of visitors. In the past (before March 2008) they were counted in the 0 to 10 seconds pool. Ms changed this a while back.

Is there anywhere in Microsoft Analytics where I can change my pools. I would like to split my 1-10 pool in a 1-5 and a 5-10.

Is that possible?