Long Time Visitors in Woopra Are Not Really “Stuck”, They’re Just Idle
A few people have pointed out a little anomaly in their statistics that we’re going to call “stuck users” for lack of a better term. This perplexing behavior can be quite confusing, so I thought it would be useful to explain exactly what we are seeing, as its not exactly intuitive.
The Bug is NOT a Bug!
How many of you have noticed that sometimes you might have a visitor who appears to have been on your site for hours, or sometimes even days? I know I have. At first I could not understand what was going on.
No other web analytics provider shows you this behavior (mostly because they aren’t really LIVE, but that’s another story) for two reasons:
- They have decided, for you, that this information is irrelevant. They figure if a visitor is idle, then they are not really a visitor any more. I heartily disagree! But we’ll get to that in a minute.
- It uses valuable system resources on the tracking servers to keep track of long time visitors.
The reality is that every visitor that Woopra is reporting as being on a page is absolutely still viewing that page.
Let’s be more specific. What I mean is, in order for Woopra to report that a visitor is on a specific page, their Web browser must still be executing our JavaScript. When it does so, it pings the Woopra server every 10 seconds to basically say “I’m still here.” When the pinging stops, the visitor disappears from your view.
For example, if I’m visiting your Web site in one tab in Firefox, but happen to be reading another page at the moment in another tab, Woopra still reports that I’m on your page. We can have a healthy debate about whether this is philosophically accurate, but technically speaking this is 100% true.
Let’s look at an example case with one of our Woopra Members.
The Stuck Visitor Issues
Mitch over at Planet5D, one of the most awesome sites I’ve ever seen about Canon 5D cameras (which I personally use), has been kind enough to document the issue he’s experiencing. He shared the following opinions with me on the subject:
Now maybe you’re right in that they’re still on the page with the browser open, but you and I both know that they’re not actively on that one page for hours and hours. But leaving them on my list does nothing but confuse me…
And not to mention, that just because they’ve been on one page for 8-10 hours doesn’t mean I want them counted in my stats of length of time on site – we know they’re gone and they shouldn’t be counted in the time calcs! I’m looking at one person who has 11 visits and 35 hours on site – this is just wrong.
Mitch also shared a screen shot (and even made a video capture) to illustrate the point:
As we can see, he has captured a visitor who reports to have been on only a couple of pages for over three hours. Furthermore, they even followed an outgoing link! So why the heck are they still being reported by Woopra? Well, its simple. They followed the outgoing link in a new browser window (or tab). Meanwhile, they left the Planet5D site open to the page they were interested in so they could come back to it later.
The Good News about Stuck Visitors
A few points I’d like to make about this issue of “stuck visitors” and how it might impact your Woopra experience:
- Mitch is seeing a lot more of this behavior than many of us because his site is so authoritative, magnetic and information rich. People want to come back! So if you’re seeing it too, this is something you should take into consideration. It is a unique browsing habit that is rare, though with the adoption of multiple tabbed browsing, may occur more frequently.
- Even if your server is down, as long as the visitor still has the page open Woopra reports them as being on the site. To the reader, they are still looking at your content, and their browser is still pinging our server. Your server does not need to be up for this. If they leave the page (or refresh) however, it stops.
- While you, the Webmaster, may not think of the visitor as still “being on your site,” I bet your visitor still thinks of themself that way! I know that if you asked me if I was still on Mitch’s site right now, I’d say yes. It’s open in another tab as I write this. (Has been for hours.)
- The fact that you are aware that the end user’s browser is still on your page represents opportunity. You could still tag them, open a chat with them, or even force page reloads on them with new advertising or other content in it. You have to think outside the box to determine what to do about it!
Frankly, as long as we’re crazy enough to use our resources to tell you that visitors remain on your page, I don’t understand why anyone would want to ignore that information.
What Woopra is Going to Do About It
Although I would argue passionately that everyone embrace their “stuck users” as being as valuable as active users, I realize that it’s not going to suit everyone. So we are going to work on the following changes to the service to accommodate different preferences:
- Time Out Option: We are going to implement an option soon to set a user selectable “timeout” value. When it’s ready it will appear in your site’s administration area and you will be able to choose the length of time a user is idle to begin excluding them.
- Track Multiple Open Pages: We are looking into being able to track multiple open pages simultaneously, preferably with the ability to denote which pages are idle or in the background.
- Improve Accuracy: We’re also looking into some other enhancements that might further improve the accuracy, though they would likely only be available to paying clients because of resources they would consume.
It will be at least a few weeks before we get these changes made because of the number of projects lined up, but rest assured that they are coming.
Cheers! @Johnpoz
John, thank you so much for putting this together – I finally understand!
This is the one piece of information that you knew but I don’t think very many woopra users actually realize: “their Web browser must still be executing our JavaScript. When it does so, it pings the Woopra server every 10 seconds to basically say “I’m still here.” When the pinging stops, the visitor disappears from your view.”
My ‘assumption’ was that Woopra servers were only pinged when the user first visited the page – I’m under the suspicion that most analytics work that way (but maybe that’s just the general misconception?). So in my head, I didn’t understand that there was a constant pinging going on (tho it sure makes more sense now!).
This in fact clears up several issues that I had. I never quite understood why woopra didn’t always count every visitor that a hit counter for example counts. Your code is detecting ‘live’ visitors based on that javascript and things that are bots or other users who don’t really stay on the page at least 10 seconds (or maybe you’ve got other code in there to detect a live person vs a bot), so hit counters and woopra could significantly differ on who’s really there!
One more thing… you mentioned an admin ‘time out option’ – I’m wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be better/easier or both to just implement a filter we can put on the live page? say something like “visitor.pagevisittime < 600 seconds” (or something similar)… so that way we could filter on the client side very easily. And sometimes, i’ll leave it your way, and sometimes, i’ll filter out people who are ‘idle’ depending on my mood LOL.
Thanks again for taking the time to explain this – I know it will help a lot of users!
@planetMitch
Oh by the way, on thinking about it a bit more, maybe the filter isn’t that great an option because then maybe I’d want to stack 2 filters (visitor.time and browser:firefox for example)… I’m torn. I want it on the LIVE view for sure – maybe I could set an admin setting for the length of time and there might be a check box on the LIVE view that turns on and off the visitLength filter so we could do multiples??? Just thinking out loud
I always figured this was the problem and not that users were stuck, rather they just left tabs open or pages open for ages. It’s nice to know this, if its happening alot on anyones site they should be happy i leave some tabs open for DAAYS because they’re so usefull to what im writing. I’d hate to see how long I sat on the this site for, some days i leave it open at work when i go home.
I walk home for lunch & eat at my computer & catch up on Google Reader’s feeds. Oftentimes I’ll read a post and want to follow up on it later, so I’ll right-click & open it in a background tab to “save” it. Invariably, I’ll have to go back to work before I deal with the pages I have open in the background. Sometimes I won’t even deal with them that night when I get home. Sometimes they’ll be there in the background for over a day before either a) I forget why I had it open, b) I deal with it, or c) Firefox freezes up and I have to force quit it.
How my visit is counted by the site is really none of my concern, I’m just explaining why I will seemingly spend hours on a site.
I agree with Johnpoz. My own surfing habits are often like that. I open I tab to come back later, even the next day. Work, children, beautiful weather, etc., there are so many distractions. So a stuck visitor is definitely better, than a 1 action/0 seconds visitor. But whereas the latter on is handled via BounceRate, stuck visitors so far distorted the stats. So I’m looking forward for the Time Out Option and hope that people share experiences to find a good value.
Well if they are not “really” stuck, then I don’t want that they the feature is removed! I like it as it currently is. :)
And one more thing John, creating a filter to not show them won’t really solve my other complaint, and that is the amount of time that this will add to the “total time spent” on woopra. I’m guessing we might have a disagreement on this too, but I don’t see how adding hours and hours to the stats for someone who’s just left the page open will help anyone determine a real value of how long a visitor has been on my blog. I’m guessing that browsers don’t provide the information of whether the tab that the user has my blog open is the “currently viewed” tab either.
“or even force page reloads on them with new advertising or other content in it”
Woopra can’t do that though, can it?
Mitch,
The total time spent issue is why we would implement the filtering on our servers and not in the client app. You really have to make a permanent choice to either have the data counted, or not. I can’t come up with any idea of how to have the cake and eat it too. ;-)
John
thanks for making this post
I was not sure.
I figured that this was the case, but it is nice to see it validated.
One item to note, please blur the IP addresses in the image =)
[...] to recent discussions about visitor tracking issues with multiple tabbed browsers, we’ve added an auto-time out option which can be set within WordPress on the Woopra Options. [...]
I felt I should put in my 2 cent on this one. I run a flash game portal and it’s very nice to see my visitors stuck. I have a guy in Germany that visits the site every day, 96 times so far and he’s spent over 60 hours playing various RPG’s and Strategy games. For my type of site it’s far less likely that the visitors are actually idle or in another tab since flash games can be somewhat processor intensive (along with noisy). I also find that it’s useful for determining which games people like since they have a tendency to not rate them I can just look over how long the games are being played and how often. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that in some cases it’s a useful feature to have and I’d really like to see it remain available throughout the future releases.
We have seen it a few times where in some cases it has gone on for almsot a couple of days. I always figure that the visitor left us open to return to the site as they felt it important enough to view the content, or join etc. Another theory is they fell asleep at teh keyboard :)
I think it is a neat feature to view this and well worth having it in there.
I figured that this was the case too. I like this feature mainly because my site is a programming blog and I like to think that when people spend more than an hour on a page its because they found it informative and maybe trying out the example code.
I have noticed that visitors seem to get stuck idle on the live tab of the Woopra Client. I had believed before that those users were still on the site, but were idle for whatever reason, such as maybe they got up from their computer. Thank you for verifying this, as this “stuck” visitor issue, has helped calm my client during times. Thank you guys for all your hard work!
Jacob Hejny, President
TigerWare Developments
Now that I think about it, I think tabs have become the newer, more up to date bookmarking system- at least for me they have. When I keep a tab open for days at a time –it’s usually amazon.com or blogs I need to read when I have a minute. I just upgraded my woopra and am hoping to finally try this whole woopra thing out.
[...] tab browsing is causing havoc among many web analytics tools recently, including Woopra. We’re all experiencing problems tracking visitors who open sites in tabs but don’t [...]
we manage an internet radio, we need to know how long our visitor spending time even they minimize the windows. this is very important to let us know :)