Thursday, December 01, 2005
What impact do RSS feeds have on visit length?
I noticed recently that a huge portion of our visitors were in the 0-30 seconds 'visit length' section of our stats. Almost 80% of people seem to find us and they seem to leave as soon as they arrive!
This got me thinking, and was one of the reasons I redesigned the homepage, to try to encourage people to do more on the site. We have long term plans to develop more interactive features and so on for BifSniff, but finding the time is difficult.
I then took some consolation in the stats for Boing Boing which shows a somewhat similar trend.
However, it must be possible to improve on this. At the Geek Dinner this evening I asked Robert Scoble whether he found being a big name in blogging, and having a very focussed blog resulted in longer visits. He pointed out that he doesn't currently have access to those kinds of stats being on wordpress.com.
Oh, he's missing the joys of being a stats junkie... :P
So I asked Tom R what he finds as he has a well respected and highly focussed blog also. He confirmed that 0-30sec visits are a high proportion on his blog also.
Then something Tom said about feeds clicked with me, and I wondered what impact RSS subscriptions have on stats with regard to visit length.
The 'top pages' section of our stats has the atom feeds very near the top of the list, and Mark who was sitting next to me felt that this would indeed impact on visit lengths.
People subscribed to RSS feeds will have their feed readers poll the feed - which only takes a moment, and then they have the content and can read it at their leisure. They no longer need to spend 10/15 minutes on your site reading your post.
A quick grab of your feed and they're gone again.
So I feel a little bit better now about our huge portion of short visit lengths. Perhaps subscribers to our feeds are inflating the figure somewhat.
Anyone care to comment/confirm/disagree?
3 Comments:
I'm certain that someone will probably come swinging in to set me straight, (they always do) but I will mention that the lack of site visits is a reason that some people switch to partial text feeds.
Annoying as those can be, and some people find them very annoying refusing to even subscribe to anything which only offers partials, they do pretty much force viewers to click on through to the site where their hit is recorded and they can be exposed to any advertising or site stickiness which may be in place.
The feeds thing can affect your overall traffic, but you can still track what proportion of your traffic is using RSS and what proportion is actually visiting your blog.
Mark - I know the full/partial feeds debate rages on, and I think it's mostly a matter of what you are trying to achieve etc. But for BifSniff I don't think partial feeds would work.
In any case, I believe I read recently that a study showed that publishing full feeds still resulted in click throughs.
Michele - yes, we use Statcounter as well as AWstats and this eliminates two things - feeds and our syndicated cartoon pages. And as a result it does indeed show visitors staying on the site longer. However currently it only shows the last 100 logs.
I am not using Google Analytics at the moment as I am trying to decide if I want to add to Google's knowledge about me... :P
Do you have any other suggestions regarding tracking traffic?
Is Google Analytics the way to go?
Thanks guys!
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