Looking at the amount of time spent on your site can give clues as to how well it’s meeting visitor expectations and engaging their interest.

Use the ClickTracks “Create Labels” tool, and select “had a certain session length” combined with “at most 5 seconds” as your criteria to track people who left your site almost immediately. Then, create another label using the same criteria, but select “at least 60 seconds” (or your preference) to identify all the visitors who spent some significant time on your site.

Now you can investigate:

Which are your best performing keywords and referrers:

• Which keywords and referring sites result in long visits?

• Which result in short visits?

  If you have a lot of traffic from certain keywords, but these result in very short visit lengths, check the landing pages for those searches (see Part 3 of this series for more on this topic). It may be that the first page that visitors see is not meeting their expectations, and should be modified.

  If you have keywords that are very successful in generating visitors who stay on your site, check that you’ve optimized them for as many search engines as possible.

Which pages do the people who stay on your site (long visits) see:

• Which pages engage your visitors the most? (check the time spent on the page from the Navigation report). Then ensure that you have appropriate calls to action on these pages to drive your traffic to the next step, so that visitors are not leaving from these points.

• Are these pages attracting enough traffic?

  If you have pages which are clearly successful once you’ve got visitors to them, are there ways to increase the number of people who see them? Is the navigation to these pages sufficiently attractive from other parts of your site? Should they be better positioned?