Does anyone have a full understanding of the "visit duration" stats on Google Analytics? Is it more a measure of the site as whole (how long they spend on the site before leaving) or a measure of how long they are on pages in general before moving on to a new page? So many human variables come into play when I'm trying to make sense of analytics, but then again I have a tendency to think entirely too much about some things.
It is duration of visit for enitre site but it does not give you the best estimates. So if a user goes to your site and stays there for an hour on one page but does not click on any link, then you get 0 visit duration. Since so many people were having doubts regarding this problem, I wrote an entire post on it which will give you deep understanding of duration and bounce rate. If you are interested in that, follow this link- http://www.earnyourmillions.com/2013/02/why-does-my-google-analytics-tool-show.html
Thanks for the reply, it seems like a very odd, unreliable statistic. We post articles on our site, and we use outbrain to promote them and we are getting a large boost in traffic, but the durations aren't showing positive numbers so I am just trying to make sense of the situation. Thanks again!
I don't get some of it myself, but this might help: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2731565
Yeah I've checked all of the support pages Google offers. I was just looking to see if anyone who has questioned it as well could tell me about it in "layman's terms" so to speak. Thanks for all the advice!