How Google Analytics Tracks: Avg. Time on Site

If you’re confused why the average time for a specific visitor is 00:00:00 or is flat out lower than you’d expect don’t dump your adwords campaign just yet.

Google analytics needs at least two points (A and B) to track time. So if a visitor comes to your home page (point A) and looks at information for 1min and then click through to your about page (point B) on that click analytics records current Avg. Time on Site and will read as 1min. Now on your about page the visitor spends and additional 2mins and exits (google needs another page to record time) their Avg. Time on Site will still only read as 1min even though they spent 3min total on your page (1min home page, 2min about page). This is because Analytics did not have an ending reference point to calculate the time.

Basically analytics tracks Avg. Time on Site from page to page (when it calls the tracking code) so the last page the visitor views will not be included in their Avg. Time on Site. With that said if a visitor comes to your home page (point A) and exits no matter how long they were on that page their Avg. Time on Site will read as 00:00:00.

Hope this helps!