HELP: Need to know how long visitors are staying on blog post??

  • Unknown's avatar
    barryb64 · Member ·

    Here’s the problem:

    In August 2022, I’ve been getting visits to very old blog posts, according to the basic WordPress Stats. I just checked and it only started in August. There is just one problem, I’ve no way of knowing if I’m getting fake visits or real visits.

    I’ve visited Google Analytics and I’m regrettfully using their reporting system. Though I am able to learn where the traffic coming from, session duration is a different story. Is this for one page or multiple? How about the duration that a post received?

    As a writer, page duration is important as it gives me a clue of visitor’s interest. My blog posts are typically 1500 words or more. That’s only a couple of minutes for active reading and 20 seconds for speed readers.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    WordPress.com stats do not have that kind of granular info, so you may need to turn to Google Analytics to get more insight into how long visitors spend on your page.

    I’ve visited Google Analytics and I’m regrettfully using their reporting system. Though I am able to learn where the traffic coming from, session duration is a different story. Is this for one page or multiple? How about the duration that a post received?

    We are not experts in Google Analytics, so we cannot guide you further, but it is my understanding that due to the way that website stats are collected, even Google struggles in this regard. For example, if a user exits your site by closing the window, closing the tab, or typing another website into the URL bar, Google Analytics can’t track this.

    I think they stick to “average time on page” to show this data because there is no perfect way to measure the time a specific visitor spends on a particular page. Additionally, from my research, Google Analytics will end a “session” after some time has passed because they cannot know if they are still there or wandered off but left their browser open.

    Even for Google, you can see this is tricky to measure. Sadly I don’t have a better answer since our stats do not record this data, but I did find this article from our sister product (Jetpack) that has some helpful info on how to interpret average time on page: https://jetpack.com/blog/average-time-on-page

    Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.

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