time spent on a web page

[Anon]

Hi all,

I am working on a project that needs to track the users that visit a website. I am interested in knowing how long the user spends on each page (before moving onto the next). Any take on how this can be achived. Is it also posible to detemine on the next page visited by the user?

Regards,
Krishna.

[[deleted]]

webservers log many things.
You can tell your webserver to log the REFERER too.
That way you know which page the user came from.
Then you have to work your way backwards.

You start with the latest entry in the log (the newest)
and see where the request came from (who was reading the page) and which page he came from (REFERER)
Then you can search for the next (older) record that has the same user, and has the url that was in the REFERER of the other record.
The time between these two records is the time the user spent on the page in the second record.

Ofcourse this has all been done before, so unless it's a school project or something, I'd suggest you look for a nice weblog analyzer.

[Anon]

As vincent said, you'll need to use a log analyzer to avoid giving yourself the dreaded LogEye disease. I reccommend Analog for most uses: http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/

The best thing to do is parse out only a specific users data and then just follow them through their requests.

Read the articles available on that site for the exact information, but what you're wanting to do can't be done without a javascript onunload type of deal. Even then...

The problem is the server can only know when a page was requested from what IP, basically.

Using my browsing habits of opening 20 browser windows it would be utterly impossible to see how long I've been surfing. It would look like I spent less than a minute, when often I spend more than 3 hours on some sites.

Add in caching which you just can't control in most cases, and you basically have no hope of seing how long a user spent on one page.

So javascript or it's equivalent is your only hope. Then again, many users kill such java uses...

[Anon]

The way I would do this is to set a cookie, with a timestamp, and a id of the page when the user loads the page. Then on each page, check for existence of the cookie, compute difference with now()-timestamp, and log that time with the page id. Then reset the cookie with info for new page.

This would still work, though data wouldn't be very 'real', if people use multiple browser windows. (but don't worry too much about that, as most browse w/ one window)

[Anon]

Btw, all these methods (except javascript) won't tell you when someone stops looking at your page, and nothing can tell you how long they were actually looking at your page.

All the time people open browser windows, go do something else, then come back.

Some people I know leave their browser windows open all day, then the next day they just use the Refresh button to reload the data.

As you can imagine just a tiny percentage of users that do that totally screw up your access data.

So when a site talks about how sticky their content is by quoting how long people stay on their site, they are either A) lying, 😎 blowing smoke up your..., or C) incompetant (or hoping that you are).

The joys of the stateless internet, lol 😉

[[deleted]]

Javascript could probably do a ;more accurate' job, but then again your stats would get F'ed if people switch off javascript, not to mention the herds of nerds that use Lynx and other non-javascript browsers.

Oh, and ofcourse there would be a limit to how long any person can look at a page. If you have a 1kbyte text, it's not very likely that a person would spend 26 hours looking at it, so more than 30 mins is definately a timeout, person is doing something else, count next hit as a new visit.

If you look at the stats generated by analyzers, you'll allways see an 'entry' and 'exit' page. the exit page is the last hit that did not produce any new hits within the timeout period. How long they spent looking at that is not very interesting because after that the user either found what he/she was looking for, or they lost interest.
So only the fact that they left the site there is important.

And, a refresh/reload usually also generates a hit in the log, because the cache needs to check if the page has been updated. It's just the content that's not sent if the cache desides there was no change.

[Anon]

You've still got the problem of not knowing what the user was doing while the webpage was up on their screen.

Lots of times, I'll pull up a webpage, then I'll go do four or five shots of Beam, smoke a cheap cigar and then come back and read the page.

And, I do it all just to screw up access logs! :-)

Seriously, you can't trust that a user has totally dedicated him/herself to your webpage for any given period of time (unless they're clicking on links like mad).

The best thing, I think, is to make your content short and sweet so that page requests should never have to be more than a couple of minutes apart. Then, instead of a nebulous 30 minute timeout (The only times I've spent 30 minutes on a single webpage have been in on-line HOWTO's) you can cut it down to like 5 or 10 minutes.

In cases where you've got a lot of content on a page, you never know how dedicated your users are.

[Anon]

Assuming you could track user times accurately (and that's a big assumption), a statistician would treat the 30 hour users as outliers and discard their data. Averages would then be computed based on a sample of the remaining users.

[[deleted]]

You can track user times accurately, you just don't know what they have been doing during that time :-)

The 30 hours would be single hits, not entire sessions. They would not be discarded. Instead, the 30 hours would be a timeout in a session.
After 30 hours of no activity you can be pretty sure the client has stopped visiting your site.