Average visit duration in dashboard widget much higher than combined time on page in Behaviour->Pages

Hi,

I’ve a problem (or misunderstanding) of average time on page vs. average visit duration while using segments.

Under Behaviour->Pages I see an average time on page of 0,5-1min per page:

Going to the dashboard, creating and applying a segment for these pages, the average visit duration increases to approx. 12 minutes:


Even combining the time on page of all subpages, I don’t come close to 12 minutes, it’s rather 2 minutes.

Using the segment, I’d expect the average visit duration in the dashboard widget being (more or less) the sum of all average times on page. Am I wrong and/or missing something? The 12 minutes is also much high than the 5-6 minutes without any segmentation.

Thanks & best regards,
Stefan

Do you know that when a bounce or exit occurs on a page the time on page is set to zero? A page with a bounce of 30% or more will then be dramatically affecting the time on page value. You could enable heartbeat to give better page time accuracy.

https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/faq_21158/

Hi,

To be more precise: By default Matomo calculates the time on page by taking the time difference to the next pageview. So if only one site is visited the pagetime is zero. Heartbeat fixes this.

And keep in mind that the average visit duration is not the sum of the average time on page of every page. After all not every visitor visits all your sites exactly once.

Yes, that is also my understanding. Not sure that your elaborated post will help @sschleif anymore than the brief info I have already supplied.

Hi,

Sorry, I didn’t want to imply your answer was incorrect or incomplete. I just sometimes feel like explaining things a bit more detailed in case someone finds the thread via a search engine and doesn’t already know the full context.

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Thanks guys, that was very helpfull.