There is absolutely no way I would take any notice of the average. although I might be more interested in the distribution spread across customer sements..

Again, I need to ask what I always ask people for literal questions - why do you need this information?
I will bet my favourite sock there are more meaningful indicators to answer the core question that you have than simple session time.

the other thing to keep in mind that session time is one of the most unreliable/dubious numbers that an analytics tool can generate?

Jon

the KPIs i would look at for this sort of thing would be Conversion rate splits between New visitors, Repeat visitors, buyers, and non buyers per session repectively.

On top of that I would look at recency of purchase and/or recency of visit of those groups of users. and changes in those indicators over time. You need a decent tool to measure these..

My personal view is that these dependant upon 2 primary variables as a e-tailer.
- quality of stock (some users are product driven)
- stickiness of content (some users are content driven)

of course there are other variables (speed of site, brand recognition, smart merchandising etc) but they are the two main ones above IMHO.

On 17:15:21 1 July 2005 Ashley wrote:

I agree with Jon on this - I struggle to see how a benchmark for "average time on homepage" could be of any meaningful use? 

Are you talking about first time or repeat visitors? Is the homepage the same or dynamic? Are you assuming the homepage is the entry page or do you mean at any point in the journey? Do you mean someone who has come direct to the site or from a search engine? What type of retailer are you talking about - luxury or commodity? What kind of page design - scrolling or not? What age of user? What experience of user?

Those are just some of the variables that spring to mind. 

I would also suggest that for well-indexed, larger sites, around 80% of new visitors, referred from search engines, won't come in at the homepage. So if they see the homepage at all then it will quite probably be in a different mindset to someone who deliberately went to the homepage.

I think much more interesting would be to look at site engagement / "bounce" rates i.e. what % of people who see the homepage go any futher. You can then do A/B or multivariate testing to experiment on how to improve this. Of course, usability testing (and clickmap / eyetracker stuff) can be very revealing for homepages and key site processes too.

But if you really want a figure.... 6.231 secs is the average...

 Ashley

On 09:29:22 30 June 2005 RogerWillcocks wrote:

Anybody done any analysis (through site statistics) of what would constitute an average - especially in the realm of online retail?
Guidance welcome and views gladly shared...

Surely it depends upon what the purpose of the Home Page is.   If it is simply an entry point with a couple of buttons that take you to the start of specific processes then if they linger the Home Page is probably not doing its job, failing on a technical or presentational issue.   If, however, its a shop window full of goodies and special offers - as many of the most successful retail sites are -  then the longer the visitor looks at it the better (as long as they act after looking!).   So length of visit can be worth while but it depends upon what RW wants to achieve.

I believe that you should monitor Home Page speed anyway as a key indicator of whether you are delivering a satisfactory technical service.