ClickTale Blog

Nielsen NetRatings’ newly released ‘total minutes’ metric measures a site’s popularity based on how many minutes a page was open.  The new release is an improvement over the old ‘page views’ metric which does not take into account the duration of time for which a page was open on a user’s computer. Though an improvement over the older system, ‘total minutes’ does not take in to account the coffee and bathroom breaks of it’s human users. How often have you dropped whatever you were doing on line to go scavenging for food, or to run to the appointment you’ve forgotten about? In our case, it happens every day. Obviously, these sorts of incidents have the potential to skew the results significantly.

Enter ‘ActiveTime’, the technology employed by ClickTale’s analytics. ActiveTime values the time a user has spent interacting with a page, rather than just the amount of time a page has been left open. Even if you haven’t left your desk chair all morning, there is a pretty good chance that you’re surfing three, four, or even more sites at the same time. Maybe you’ve left something running on your screen to share with a colleague who’s out to lunch. Maybe you were the kind of kid whose mother had to remind them to put away whatever toy you were playing with before taking out a new one. Even though you finished reading the New York Times online edition before your coffee break, you may have neglected to close that window while working with another program. ClickTale, being aware of this phenomenon, and sensitive to the obstacles it poses, began including ActiveTime technology in their recording services more than a year ago. Using ActiveTime as a part of ClickTale produces more accurate and meaningful results than any other metrics system on the market.

So go ahead and signup for ClickTale, you can even take a coffee break in the middle of the process. We don’t mind ;).