I'm going through my site's analytics and find these to be true, month after month: A. A great majority of visitors either type our address in manually to reach our site, or they search for a variation of our company's name. B. A great majority of visitors view only 1 page (usually the homepage) and stay for less than 10 seconds. SO, how does that make sense? They are specifically looking for us or know who we are. Why then would they visit so quickly and then leave? I'm stumped and any rationale you may have would be wonderful. THANKS!!
that's good, that means repeat/loyal customer That's weird. Are you sure they are not bots. I can only think of somebody making it a "home page" on one of the tabs that are remembered in the browser and loaded every time the browser is opened. Are you sure that A and B are the same people? The high bounce rate (B) usually correspond to random visits via keywords that nor really characterize your site. Alternatively: I want to know where company XYZ is located or what is XYZ phone number. I searched for XYZ, I see the phone # or address on the first or second page, that's what I needed so I close the browser or go somewhere else.
Those are good points, and I re-checked my stats. But alas, I still am not sure what to think, except that MAYBE the stats are wrong?? For Dec., we had 10,525 visits. 9,081 were direct visits, so the search engine hypothesis is ruled out. 1,604 of those visits were Bots, and they had 1,712 page views (out of a total of 38,099 page views). I don't think that's enough to skew the stats that much, so the Bot theory isn't it. People could have it set as a homepage, but I don't see why...it's not a news site or anything that's updated constantly. And they could be searching for a phone # or email then leave, but still...that's an awful lot; more than I would reasonably suspect. We use Urchin. Is it even a little bit possible that the stats are just wrong? ** We had 7,298 visits that viewed only 1 page, and 7,974 visits who viewed for 10 sec or less. (out of 10,525 visits)
I use Opera and have about 20-30 tabs stored and loaded every time I restart the browser. Mostly with the stuff somewhat related to what I am working on, but sometimes I forget to close the page and it may stay there (and reloaded) until I need more tabs and clear them up. These tabs would count as direct hit on each browser restart... PS: why not to use Google analytics?
That could be a possibility, though I don't think it would account for the majority of visits. The stats say Opera users are only 0.67% of our total visitors. I don't know much about browsers and which would do this reload every time. IE users are 55.56% of our visitors. As for Google analytics, Urchin is actually the same thing but on steroids, so it's better (it's a Google product). Plus it's what our web company provides for us, so we really don't have a choice.