Problem With Google Analytic's Reporting, doesn't display time spent on page correctly

  • 18 October 2015
  • 4 replies
  • 11 views

I’ve got a problem across all of my pages on unbounce, I feel like the analytics reporting isn’t accurately capturing the time visitors are spending on my landing pages and it is actually getting me in trouble with some clients because they think that visitors are spending 0 seconds on the pages, I have had days where according to google analytics all visitors are spending 0 seconds on the pages, but on those same days I am receiving leads from the very same pages, I know the visitors are spending more than 0 seconds on the pages because there is no way they could fill out the form in 0 seconds is there? Unbounce support didn’t really have an answer for me so I was wondering if anyone else has seen this issue? The landing pages I create with unbounce work, but the reporting on google analytics doesn’t seem to and my clients are doubting the power of the program as a result. Any suggestions? Move to Instapage?


4 replies

Instapage will port all of your pages over for free. GA works accurately with our service and we are more affordable and much easier to use. You won’t be charged for traffic limitations or custom domains. Shoot an email to kieran@instapage.com and we will help you out. 

Hi Michael, 
Thanks for reaching out to the Community about this. You’re right, there shouldn’t be any real reason for the pages to be showing 0 seconds spent on page. While I’m not immediately sure what the answer is for this one, I’m going to make sure my engineering team can dig in further tomorrow to (hopefully) find an answer for you. 

Hang tight! Look out for an email from me shortly. 

I have the same issue.  Getting leads but the bounce rate is 100% and not showing up in analytics.

Userlevel 3
Badge +1

Hey Michael and Josh,

If a visitor only ever lands on one page on your site, GA will mark their time spent as 0-seconds.

By default, Google Analytics sends a Page View as soon as someone hits the page, but GA doesn’t receive any additional info unless another GA event or Page View is triggered. So, if someone hits your page and doesn’t interact with anything that GA is tracking and doesn’t navigate to another page on your domain, Google doesn’t know when they left and they’ll be marked as having spent 0-seconds instead.

Here’s an article that goes into GA’s reporting in some more detail: http://www.analyticsedge.com/2015/03/misunderstood-metrics-time-on-page-session-duration/

There are ways to automatically fire a GA event with some custom coding and you can also tweak your GA script to automatically fire an event after a certain amount of time (Google goes over the supported method here:http://analytics.blogspot.ca/2012/07/tracking-adjusted-bounce-rate-in-google.html). That said, I’ve read recommendations against this as well, since just having the browser tab open would mean your timed event would fire, so it’s still not an accurate measure of engagement.

Reply