Why do some visits have no duration?
Analytics leaves out the duration of a visit that recorded more than the visit lasted. No one can spend 30 hours using a website in a visit that lasted one, so the figure can't be right. The visit still counts as a visit everywhere. Only its duration is missing: on Journeys it shows a dash, and the Overview's Duration is the average of the other visits.
Why it happens
Usually, several people were counted as one visitor.
At the Cookie-free consent level, Silktide recognizes a visitor without storing anything on their device: it goes by their network address and their browser. On most websites, that is enough to tell people apart. But in an office, a school or a university, hundreds of people can reach your website from one network address, using the same browser. To Silktide they look like one person, so their page views run together into one long visit, with everyone's time added up.
It is most common on intranets, and on websites mostly used from one organization's network.
Less often, a computer went to sleep or was locked with the page open, and the time until it woke was counted.
What else it affects
Traffic counted this way is less accurate in other ways too:
- Visitors and visits are too low, because many people count as one.
- Pages per visit is too high, and Journeys shows one very long visit with hundreds of pages.
How to fix it
Measure these visitors at the Complete consent level. Complete uses a first-party cookie, so each person's browser is told apart, and their visits and durations stay separate.
- On a public website, visitors usually need to agree first. The free Silktide Consent Manager asks them, and tells Silktide when they agree.
- On an intranet or another website only your staff or students use, you may not need to ask. Check the rules that apply to you, for example with your data protection officer.
You choose the level before and after consent under Privacy. A change applies to visits from then on. Visits already recorded keep the level they were collected at.
Related
- - how a visit's duration is measured
- Consent - how much of your traffic is measured at each level
- Analytics settings - choose the consent levels