Google Analytics and the lies it tells me

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

This is just a question about a piece of confusion I have in regards to google analytics, if anyone familiar with its use can lend me a hand.
I have an account with them for my comic. When I look at the data, it says that viewers spend an average of 0 minutes and 0 seconds on the pages of the site. I realize my site might not be that captivating, but how does that figure? There has to be at least a few seconds for the things to load, doesn't there? And I know I've looked at it for more than 0 seconds... is this just a weird glitch? Maybe I put the code in wrong?

[Dr Neo Lao]

It's possible that the code is wrong, I have no idea about GA since I have never used it.

It is also possible that it is telling you averages, so it is averaging your few multi-minute visits against many one/two second visits by robots and crawlers.

As far as I know about GA, you need to put the code they give you on all your pages (both templates and the stuff in workspace/webpages) and have it up for a few weeks so that it can get averages/aggregates of data. Anything more specific and you'd need to either wait for someone who knows a lot more about GA to post or ask over at the GA support section.

Sorry I couldn't be more help...

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Oh okay, thanks. I'll try the support section. Thanks anyway!

[Reinder]

It's very simple. Google analytics does not really count page loads. It counts the number of times the Google Analytics javascript is loaded (it has this fault in common with all other javascript-based analytics tools that live on external servers). The first load is a single moment in time: 0 minutes, 0 seconds. If the visitor reads the page and then clicks on another page, the time between the first javascript load and the second is the length of the visit (probably subject to time-outs). If the visitor goes to a third page, then time difference is added to the length measurement, and so on.

There is a more serious problem with Google Analytics. If a reader comes to your website, clicks nothing, and leaves, this counts as a bounce. No distinction is made between a regular visitor who comes back for the update and then leaves, and one who sees your site for the first time, thinks "bleagh, this sucks" and leaves, which just happens to be a very important distinction to make. Google Analytics is the wrong tool for webcomics and any other medium that adds one piece of new content a day and less (if you add more, your fans coming at a fixed time will have something to click on and not get counted as bounces).

I don't know of any tools that measure loyalty (people returning at fixed intervals to consume the new updates) but surely there must be one.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Interesting. I understand the thing about not recording the time spent on just the one page say if they came to check for an update, but other pages are being viewed too, and in order to get to them you do have to click something to take you to a different page. How very strange. Oh well. Maybe I'll switch to something else for stats instead.