It can be difficult to contextualize an idea as dynamic as traffic analysis and KPI’s.

Darwin

Strictly? No. Generally? Yes.
Why “No”? If & When Exits == 0. Division by Zero is a no no.
I fudge around that by finding the max “ratio” from all other ratios from all pages and substituting that instead. Yeah it’s a nasty fudgy hack…
As with any metric – really low numbers can throw things screwy. I find > 30 entries is probably the useful limit. Any less is too “noisy”. Big numbers are no problem – tho you can get an averaging effect which swamps detail.
I also base this off the “Entry Pages” so entry == 0 is not an issue.

I haven’t (yet) tried trending it over a period of time. Be interesting to see if it changed anything…

I suspect it would be wise to segment before generating the ratio, to really drill down, but for general KPI work is probably a Good Start(tm).

High Time visits? I’d agree with the sentiment. But is an “engaged user” an agreeable goal? On work’s site – no. Or rather, not really. Get ‘em in, and show them the right exit for their needs asap. Anything more is wasting their time.
If we can solve their need in two pages that’s perfect; Any more suggests we’ve failed somewhere.
Slight hyperbole. Well a lot actually, but you get the idea.
Ideally we’d solve their need in one page, but legals won’t let us….

Ditto on my personal site to a large degree – single page – no engagement wanted or even desirable. I would rather see greater engagement, via discussion, on the mailing list I host, than the website.
Which leads me to (re) think that I probably need to do more to make the list more obvious. Thanks!

- Steve

I like the suggestion from Eric’s Hacks — forgot about that one. Will have to take a look at it again. Have you found it to work well regardless of the traffic level of the page? Does the effectiveness change if trended over longer periods of time?

Either methods work for me for the Bounce Rate / Time Spent on Pages. Not sure the viewing of pages over time long periods of time is all that common on the site I’m measuring, but worth deeper eval. Doubtful most users are viewing this way. Both Jim Novo and Brian Eisenberg would say that high time visits are typically reflective of a more engaged user. That was our thinking in including it.

Agree with Exit Ratio. You can easily end up with a one-to-one. We had examples like this with our RRSP content. We ranked high in search engines for the information. People came to our site. Got the answer and left. Not a problem with the page really from a content perspective but it was from an inability to move the reader towards some further engagement or conversion.

Thanks again,

- Scott

Set with a simple Red/Green flipper. Pages = “1.0″ Green. Can obviously put an “Orange” (1.0 -> 1.3 for example) in there if you need a maybe.

If’s but’s and maybe’s around the use of this one.
Even so, I find it extremely useful to get a quick glace at what is vs isn’t working. Been extremely accurate for me – both personally and @ work. Both being content sites.
Even works very nicely on pages that I regard as “one hit wonders”. ie If you see nothing else, see this one page. 1:1.

Works very effectively if you have Page A as a landing page and generic page B as the obvious exit.

“Bounce Rate / Time Spent on Page in Seconds”
I’d need to see some numbers first as a qualifier – but wouldn’t this be better off inverted (1/##)?
Why? We (as people ) tend to associate high numbers with Good Things(tm), not bad – so playing more to the obvious psychology?
You may find some sort of inbuilt fudge factor useful to smooth numbers out to account for quick pages to read vs slow pages.

My gut feel tho, any metric dependent on “Time on Page” has an inbuilt (IMHO fatally flawed) assumption that people are *actually* looking at the page.
I’ve worked for many years where I will open 5-10 pages off search results and gradually work my way through them. Possibly the last one may have been “open” for 10-20 minutes, or longer, before I actually read anything off it.
I’d argue this behaviour is more prevalent on content sites vs shopping style. Happy to be proven wrong.
And I could be weird. It’s been noted before.

“Exit Ratio”?
You could also suggest that an end user found exactly what they were looking for and didn’t need to go any further. ie 1:1 again. That could be a sign of perfect success. Perhaps not for “your” site, but could be for “mine”; if you ken.

Thoughts?

- Steve