Depth and Length of Website Sessions

Video segment 6 of 12 - click here to watch the full video.

Another perspective on web traffic is the depth and length of the sessions. The opposite of a bounce session is a "sticky" session, meaning that the visitor stuck around taking the time to look at a few pages. There will always be a high percentage of these 1 page "bounce" sessions. But what I like to look for is a nice distribution of the rest. In this case I see quite a few sessions that look at 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 pages and then it flattens out until I get to 20 and more where I see a boost. That means I have descent retention in many overall sessions, and a considerable number of in-depth readers. I should see a similar structure in my length of time report since the number of pages viewed and the time it takes to read then should correspond.


I'm skipping the Bytes and File Type reports. Bytes keeps track of the total bandwidth used and Files identifies downloads other than web pages (like images, PDFs, and videos).

One point of interest in comparing Urchin with Google Analytics is that Google doesn't measure bandwidth or files. That's because Urchin uses our raw server logs to generate its reports. Google Analytics doesn't use our log files. Instead it uses a special bit of code we embedded on every page. When each page loads it triggers a call to Google Analytics which uses these hits to generate it's reports. As a result they don't have data on bandwidth, and because non HTML files like images, PDFs, and videos don't have this bit of code embedded in them they don't register with Google.

But Google Analytics does have other advantages. In fact, since the rest of the reports in Urchin--Referrals, Domains & Users, and Browsers & Robots are handled just as well or better in Google Analytics, let's use their system to review the rest of our website activity.   next >