Hit Counters

[William H.]

I added a free counter to my site with sitemeter.com and I'm trying to find out why it says that a large number of visitors stay for zero seconds. As you can see in this screen capture, almost half of the hits on the list below fall into this category:


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v80/harnett65/asm1.jpg


Supposedly Sitemeter screens out spider and bot hits and only counts human ones, I could understand if people were taking a quick look for five, ten or fifteen seconds, but zero seconds doesn't make sense.

Does it have something to do with the browser used, or maybe if cookies are turned off?

There is a little square at the bottom of my site that will take you to my site meter page if anyone wants to see more of the service offered by them, the image above is from my "Details" page:

Puzzle Photos (http://puzzlephotos.blogspot.com/)

[scribble]

Because if they only load 1 page, it's impossible to tell how long they looked at it. It' sonly when they it a second page, or reload the same page, that you can tell how long they've been there. So I assume those are all the folks who hit your page and left.

The technical details of why this is so are simple. If it' snot obvious to you just by hearing the answer, let me know and I'll try to provide a better explanation of WHY this is the fact. I'm not very good at explanations, though.

[Dogbreath]

It looks like the Sitemeter can only determine duration when multiple pages are viewed. So it someone comes to your site views reads the entire page and then leaves without viewing any other pages then sitemeter would not have any thing to calculate the time some one may have been at your site.

[William H.]

That was quick, I believe you are both correct, I hadn't noticed that time was recorded only when a second page was viewed.

Thanks for the replies.