Guest Article by Shmuli Goldberg

Many of our customers often ask what we mean when we say “In Page” web analytics, a term we coined several years ago. In this post, we’ll take a quick look at what In-Page analytics is, how it differs from other types of web analytics and why you need to use it.

What is In Page Analytics?

Most web analytics solutions capture visitors landing on a web page and monitor their movement from page to page within a site. This is great for collecting quantitative information about your website traffic, with pageviews, number of visitors and time on page being the key metrics. However, this traditional approach to web analytics can’t tell you much about what visitors do once inside these pages.

That’s where In-Page analytics comes in. It focuses on visitor interactions inside these pages, recording everything from mouse moves and clicks to actual keystrokes. This gives a much more qualitative, almost intimate, view into what your visitors are focusing on and interacting with inside the pages themselves.

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What’s wrong with “Time on Page”?

Last week, we looked at “Time on Page”, a statistic used by most traditional web analytics to gauge user interaction within a webpage. And while we weren’t Google-bashing (really, we weren’t!), we did point out some very serious inaccuracies with Google Analytics’ method of calculating “Time on Page”.

In this post we’ll be talking about “Engagement Time”, which measures exactly how long your visitors are actually interacting with your content. We’ll be looking closely at how it works, what it tells you, and how you can ultimately use it to improve your web content, conversion rates and ROI.

“Time on Page” vs “Engagement Time”

Traditionally, “Time on Page” tells you one thing and one thing only - how long a visitor has a web page open for. However, we’ve seen from countless observations that users will often open a new tab, minimize their browser or even go off and do something else while browsing a site. All of this is normal browsing behavior, but it gives rise to one major point: “Time on Page” tells you nothing about how long your visitors actually interact with your online content!

Time on Page can change drastically, as it can be skewed by normal browsing behavior Engagement Time however, provides steady, reliable and more representative statistic

Knowing how long your visitors spend interacting with each page is vital. You need to know what content keeps your visitors interested, what keeps them busy, and what bores them. For example:

• If you have a product features page, then you want to maximize your customer’s interaction with the page, keeping them interested until they convert.
• On the other hand, if you have a signup form, you want to keep the necessary user actions to a minimum, improving usability and minimizing form abandonment.

Knowing how long the average customer really takes to convert or fill out a form is the critical first step towards tightening the funnel and increasing your conversion rates.

That’s where “Engagement Time” comes in. ClickTale can tell you how long customers actually spend reading your content, looking at your pictures, watching your videos and browsing your products. Not just how long they had a page open for, but how long that page held their attention, and whether or not they liked what they saw.
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Time on Page and Engagement Time™

We love Google Analytics, we always have. Just like ClickTale it’s free, easy to set up, comes with a lot of helpful tools, and is a great way to collect analytical information about your site. However, there are several things Google Analytics just can’t tell you, and in this post we’re going to talk about two of them:

1. Google Analytics cannot tell you anything about bounced visitors! These are visitors that come to your site, only look at the page they land on, and decide to leave. These are the potential customers you didn’t get, they are the lost sales, lost leads and lost profits.
2. Google Analytics gives you no information about how long your visitors actually interact with your online content. All it can see is the amount of time a page was left open, which doesn’t tell you anything about how long your visitors were actually looking at your content.

And now we’re going to tell you why…

Like most traditional web analytics services, Google Analytics records a “Time on Page”, denoting the time a visitor spends looking at each page in your website. It does this in three stages:

1. It records the time your visitor opens the first page.
2. It records the time your visitor opens the next page.
3. It subtracts these two times and calls the result “Time on Page”.

This method has been used by Google since it started it’s analytics service back in 2006, and while it is a simple way to gauge user interaction, Google Analytics’ method for calculating “Time on Page” and “Bounced Visitors” is woefully inaccurate!

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Did you know that about 40-50% of your site’s visitors leave after seeing just a single page?*

If half of your traffic disappears, it will take a heavy toll on your site’s conversion rate. Understanding why visitors leave and how they interact with your site is crucial to your business, and bottom line.

ClickTale has helped thousands of sites like yours gain insight into customer behavior by showing actual visitor sessions, mouse movements, clicks, scrolls and more.

Based on the feedback of many of our customers, as well as our own experiences, we have prepared a set of 8 ‘best practices’ to help you boost conversion rates and improve site usability.

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Google’s recent blog post describes how they use eye-tracking to improve the usability of the Google search results page, and showed that eye-tracking is a valuable technique for website optimization. The post received a lot of media attention, including mentions in leading blogs like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, all indications that eye-tracking techniques are of high value and of general interest.

Unfortunately, eye-tracking studies are prohibitively expensive, preventing most small and medium sized businesses from conducting their own studies and enjoying the benefits of this research method. Which is why the results of a Carnegie Mellon study titled “What can a mouse cursor tell us? Correlation of eye/mouse movements on web browsing” are so interesting and important.

The study showed that 84% of the times that a region was visited by a mouse cursor, it was also visited by (users’) eye gaze. In addition, 88% of regions that were not gazed by the eye were also not visited by a mouse cursor.

“I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I read the Carnegie Mellon study. After looking at hundreds of visitor sessions, I have no doubt that mouse cursor movements and eye gazes are highly correlated” says Tal Schwartz, Co-Founder and CEO of ClickTale.

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As any avid Olympics fan can tell you, time is of the essence. In the case of a ‘fingertip win’ like Michael Phelps’, even a hundredth of a second can make a difference between a gold and a silver medal.

The same principle applies to those of us with higher BMIs and underused gym memberships. Do you know that every single second you spend staring at the rotating hourglass on your screen has a direct effect on the way you interact with the site? It’s a fact.

Part 1 of our ClickTale Web Browsing Habits Report showed that:

• For every additional second that it takes to load a page, an extra 6 seconds is spent browsing that page.
• The Dutch and Israelis outsurf all other countries, with extremely fast Internet and in-page browsing speeds. The Chinese, with the slowest load times, spend three times as long on a typical page.

Okay, so page loading is not exactly up for consideration as an Olympic sport. However, while looking at the data we put together, we encounter a few fascinating record breakers. These are summarized at the end of this section.

One striking anomaly of the study was that Indians, whose Internet speed of 3.5 seconds is slower than average, browse an unprecedented five seconds more quickly than the stats predict. These five seconds matter.

Five seconds can mean the difference between a visitor completing a conversion on your site or being distracted by the US Gymnastics team. Hence, the fact that surfers in India take an average of 24 seconds to browse a site as opposed to the expected 29 is a phenomenon that begs an explanation.

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The Internet unites people from across the globe, but that doesn’t mean that all surfing experiences are created equal. We set out to learn how surfing differs from country to country. Our results were surprising, and a little puzzling too.

At ClickTale, we used our In-Page Web Analytics service to collect and analyze data from over 1 million visitors during the months of May and June 2008.

For starters, we wondered:

How fast are Internet speeds around the globe?

We measured Internet speeds using the average page loading speeds from each country. As you can see from figure 1 below, page loading speeds vary between 1.1 and 5.5 seconds. Israeli and Dutch surfers have the quickest page loads while Chinese and Brazilian surfers have the slowest. In fact, the Chinese experience Internet speeds that are 5 times slower than the Dutch!

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In part 1 of our ClickTale Scrolling Report, we learned that visitors scroll in a relative way - relative position inside the page, not based on absolute position in terms of pixels. In other words, the same number of page viewers will tend to scroll halfway or three-quarters through a page, regardless of whether the page size is 5,000 pixels or 10,000 pixels. In part 2, we reveal more new findings: Read on to learn about the way visitors pay attention to content on your site and what areas on your site receive the most attention.

See the end of this posting for ideas on how to make all this info work for you.

Are Your Visitors Paying Attention?

Have you ever wondered how much attention your visitors pay to your website content? We all have, of course. But until recently, most of the evidence has been based on personal observation or random investigations rather than systematic scientific evaluation. To answer this question objectively, we have analyzed over 80,000 web page browsing sessions collected over a one month period.

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In our previous report entitled “Unfolding the Fold”, we analyzed web visitors’ scrolling behavior and determined the effect of the so-called “fold” on browsing activity.

One year later we are excited to publish much more detailed research, revealing new information and providing you with a whole new set of best practices and recommendations. This research is based on a sample of a data that was collected by the ClickTale service from thousands of websites and over 80,000 page views chosen at random between June 15th and July 15th, 2007.

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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 ‘Engagement Time™’, the technology employed by ClickTale’s analytics. Engagement Time™ 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 Engagement Time™ technology in their recording services more than a year ago. Using Engagement Time™ 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 ;).