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I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw tha

by Smerity 13y ago

I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw that 11k of 13.5k[2] left within 10 seconds. If these numbers aren't accurate due to Google Analytics, I'd be interested to know a way to get the accurate numbers. The other annoying thing was that, HTTPS never sends referrers. Hence, not a single one of my visits said it was from Hacker News. I know, you don't want to leak the referrer in most circumstances when it's HTTPS, but it just seems so vital. The Internet was made and understood by referrals and links, lacking an ability to see referrers seems quite unfortunate, especially if all the Internet ends up HTTPS. Google and Facebook are the only ones who would be able to stitch together significant portions of referral traffic due to Google Analytics or Facebook Like / Connect. Everyone else is just left stumbling around blind. [1]: https://twitter.com/taybenlor/status/326622962377695232 https://twitter.com/taybenlor/status/326622962377695232 [2]: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/333534743670951936 https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/333534743670951936

zerd 13y ago
To get an accurate number of the duration of a visit you'd have to make a ajax request every second or so, or somehow make a request whenever the user closes the tab. Also, you need to measure if the tab loses focus. To get even more accurate you could store the amount of scroll the user has done over the duration, to see if the visitor actually read to the bottom. These ways are seen as quite invasive just to get the duration of a visit. I know that e.g. woopra makes a request every 10 seconds with different metrics, so they would at least get better accuracy than google analytics.
- Smerity 13y ago
  Understood. Other services do accurately measure this however. ChartBeat[1] tries to differentiate between users who are reading, writing and so on. Re: your example, it does literally keep track of how far you scrolled as well. Unfortunately, my personal website is not their target market. Plans start at $9.95 per month: infinitely more than my hosting cost and also overkill for whenever I'm not front paged. It'd only really make sense for me if it had pricing based on usage, which I can almost guarantee they'll never launch. I'd argue that Google Analytics is vague in defining or explaining their terms. In a perfect world, yes, they'd offer "pings" to see if a user is active, but even without that I'd at least hope they clarify their terms. Misunderstood terms lead to misunderstood statistics. The less misunderstood statistics, the better. [1]: https://chartbeat.com/ https://chartbeat.com/
jseliger 13y ago
I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw that 11k of 13.5k[2] left within 10 seconds. This is probably minority behavior, but I will often use Instapaper to bookmark articles for later, and then read a batch together. For most in-depth articles, I probably spend less than ten seconds decide whether I should click "Read Later" and then leaving, even though I do in fact read later.
- Smerity 13y ago
  I did consider the possibility of Instapaper, Readability or other similar apps, but as you say I couldn't imagine they'd be the majority, even on the relatively tech savvy Hacker News. As an example of alternate HN clients, hckrnews.com had 124 referrals, ihackernews.com had 85, HackerWeb had 77 and PulseWeb had 48. That's a grand total of around 300 out of 13.5k. I'd imagine Readability and Instapaper to be big but probably only some small multiple of that at best.
  - gwern 13y ago
    > As an example of alternate HN clients, hckrnews.com had 124 referrals, ihackernews.com had 85, HackerWeb had 77 and PulseWeb had 48. That's a grand total of around 300 out of 13.5k. I see similar proportions for submissions of my pages as well.

by Smerity 13y ago

zerd 13y ago

To get an accurate number of the duration of a visit you'd have to make a ajax request every second or so, or somehow make a request whenever the user closes the tab. Also, you need to measure if the tab loses focus. To get even more accurate you could store the amount of scroll the user has done over the duration, to see if the visitor actually read to the bottom. These ways are seen as quite invasive just to get the duration of a visit. I know that e.g. woopra makes a request every 10 seconds with different metrics, so they would at least get better accuracy than google analytics.

Smerity 13y ago
Understood. Other services do accurately measure this however. ChartBeat[1] tries to differentiate between users who are reading, writing and so on. Re: your example, it does literally keep track of how far you scrolled as well. Unfortunately, my personal website is not their target market. Plans start at $9.95 per month: infinitely more than my hosting cost and also overkill for whenever I'm not front paged. It'd only really make sense for me if it had pricing based on usage, which I can almost guarantee they'll never launch. I'd argue that Google Analytics is vague in defining or explaining their terms. In a perfect world, yes, they'd offer "pings" to see if a user is active, but even without that I'd at least hope they clarify their terms. Misunderstood terms lead to misunderstood statistics. The less misunderstood statistics, the better. [1]: https://chartbeat.com/ https://chartbeat.com/

jseliger 13y ago

I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw that 11k of 13.5k[2] left within 10 seconds. This is probably minority behavior, but I will often use Instapaper to bookmark articles for later, and then read a batch together. For most in-depth articles, I probably spend less than ten seconds decide whether I should click "Read Later" and then leaving, even though I do in fact read later.

Smerity 13y ago
I did consider the possibility of Instapaper, Readability or other similar apps, but as you say I couldn't imagine they'd be the majority, even on the relatively tech savvy Hacker News. As an example of alternate HN clients, hckrnews.com had 124 referrals, ihackernews.com had 85, HackerWeb had 77 and PulseWeb had 48. That's a grand total of around 300 out of 13.5k. I'd imagine Readability and Instapaper to be big but probably only some small multiple of that at best.
- gwern 13y ago
  > As an example of alternate HN clients, hckrnews.com had 124 referrals, ihackernews.com had 85, HackerWeb had 77 and PulseWeb had 48. That's a grand total of around 300 out of 13.5k. I see similar proportions for submissions of my pages as well.