My WebTrends report tells me that about 50% of website visitors left my site before the first page even loaded (zero-page views) and about 30% left after viewing the first page (one-page-views).
I know that these kind of drop-off numbers are more-or-less common to commercial sites, but here’s my question:
– If about 80% of people spend a tiny amount of time on the site, and the “average visit length” on my site is 7 minutes, does this mean that the average visit length of everyone else is a lot more than 7 minutes?
If those are the actual numbers, sure, it could work out that way. However, WebTrends is extremely goofy in how it computes numbers. It might be giving you the average visit length for everybody who waited for the page to load, or who was there for at least fifteen seconds.
Is there enough stuff on your main page that, say, 10% of your viewers could spend an hour looking at it? That might account for why 50% of the visitors are hitting their back button before the page loads completely… it’s taking freakin’ forever to load.