Being technical geeks and analytical geeks, we digest a great deal of information on any given day from our client’s Google Analytics reports.  These reports give us a great deal of valuable information that we in turn use to help improve not only search engine rankings, but web site usability.

One of the many variables measured in Google Analytics is the web site visitor’s average time on the web site.  We pay attention to this because if people are only sticking around for 2 seconds there are clearly some issues with either the web site itself, or the marketing that drove that web site visitor to the web site in the first place.  For example, if a searcher types in Orlando Widget and lands on a web site that sells Mortgages, it does not compute to the visitor: they leave and continue their search.  On the other hand, if the visitor had typed in Orlando Mortgage and lands on your Orlando Mortgage web site AND your web site is UGLY and does not instill confidence, the average time on site will clearly suffer as your web site visitor has run for the hills.

We typically see an average of about a 2 minute web site visit: if we start seeing a 15 minute web site visit, we start raising our eye brows… Sometimes you have hackers that are looking for vulnerabilities, etc that will stick around on a web site.  The bottom line here: analyzing your analytics can give you a great snapshot as to whats happening or more importantly, Whats NOT happening on your web site.