New user here, so my apologies in advance if this is an old question. (I couldn’t find any promising answers by searching the forums or FAQ.)
On one of my domains, most of the visits are listed as having a duration of “0s” (zero seconds). How exactly is this determined, and what does it mean? Does it mean an actual human user clicked on a link, but hit “Back” less than a second later? Does it mean the visitor was a spider or other robot? Or does it mean something else entirely?
A 0s visit doesn’t necessarily mean the visitor left instantly. In many analytics systems, visit duration is calculated from the time between the first recorded hit and the next interaction/pageview. If someone lands on a page, reads it for a few minutes, and then leaves without triggering another tracked event, the system may still record the visit as 0 seconds. Bots can also create zero-duration visits, but “0s” by itself isn’t proof that the visitor was a bot.
For example, on a content site someone could open an article, get the answer they need, and close the tab without visiting another page—so the analytics may show 0s even though they actually spent time reading it.
There is also a bug in the Dashboard Live Widget, because by mouse hover by the last viewed page the visit time is every time 0 seconds when the visit time of this page is <10 seconds.
Usually it just means Matomo recorded only one page view, so there wasn’t a second interaction to calculate time from. It does not automatically mean the visitor was a bot or left within one second.
