Google Analytics shows average session duration of 0 when visitors do not visit a second page on your site. This is because they can’t measure how long someone was on a page unless they visit an additional page.

Average Session Duration of 00:00:00. What gives?

If you are new to Google Analytics one of the first things you may want to do is monitor user activity. Good questions to ask yourself are “How much time are people spending on my website?” or “What is my bounce rate?”. While the answers to these questions depend entirely on the type of content you have, you are sure to notice a whole bunch of pages with a session duration of zero.

You will be happy to know that people are indeed landing on these pages. They could even be spending 10 or 20 minutes on them and becoming loyal, paying customers.

The session length column is misleading

Unless someone visits a second page on your website, Google has no idea how much time someone spent on your page, and it gets reported as 00:00:00. A better answer would simply be N/A, as most people who see 00:00:00 think that people arrived at their site and actually spent no time at all on it.

In this image: pages with a 100% bounce rate result in Analytics displaying session duration of “0”.

Is a 100% bounce rate bad?

It depends. Should it be bad? If you are answering people’s questions quickly, as I did at the top of this article, and the phone number on your site is loud and clear to mobile users, a LOT of people are going to poke around on your page for 20 seconds or so and call you, ending their session. That is what most business owners want. If you are a personal injury lawyer and someone converts you may be making $150,000.00 from that page which shows a big goose egg.

Now if you are an eCommerce website selling something, like chocolate, and someone lands on your Valentine’s Day article, a 100% bounce rate would be bad, as you want people to click through from your V-Day content to the page selling chocolates and become a sweet conversion.

Len
1 Comment
  1. Super explanation. I was searching for this answer, luckily I found this one. Thanks to author.

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