Anyone who attended my double web analytics workshops today at the Transforming Cultural and Scientific Communication conference in Melbourne today saw this lovely little Greasemonkey script in action.
And I thought I better link it for everyone who is not already using this to install.
What GARE does, amongst other things is go some way towards addressing the ‘time on site’ problem that is inherent in most if not all web analytics packages. In short this problem is that single page visits to a website are counted as having zero time spent on them and count this zero figure when creating the ‘average time on site figure. Similarly the time spent on the final page of a visit is left at zero. Blogs are especially susceptible to low time on site figures as most readers visit only one, albeit long, page before leaving.
With GARE installed you are presented with the standard ‘average tiem on site’ as well as a ‘true time on site’ which removes these single page visits from the average calculation. GARE also adds a number of other nifty user interface fixes to make your use of Google Analytics even better.
(My longer paper on web metrics from last year is available at Archimuse and the next web metrics for cultural institutions workshop happens in Indianapolis at MW09 – or on request of course!)