I have a site that is extremely heavy on front page traffic. Basically 97% of all traffic is front page traffic, and 75% of all traffic is single visit (they hit the front page and nothing else). 55% of traffic does not generate multiple page views on any given day.
I have absolutely no problem with Google reporting 0 second visits. In fact, quite the opposite, Google reports very high visit durations, as visitors tend to spend a lot of time on the front page and then leave. If there were a problem with 0 second counting, it would decimate my time on site numbers due to all the people not generating second page requests for GA to count.
I've been using Google Analytics since they purchased it, and have never run into this problem (across millions of uniques and two dozen sites). The only time I've ever seen 0 second requests on any scale, is from bots, and in that case they're easy to out by looking at flash settings + browser version. If you're seeing a huge number of 0 second requests, it's most likely a bot.
With all due respect that's a long time to use GA without understanding how it works. Here's a good article by Google's GA evangelist I would highly recommend to everybody in this thread who are throwing out anecdotes.
Thanks, I think what most people, including adventured, do is to make an assumption about GA and then forge ahead without ever checking it. The link you posted was very illuminating.
Personally, this stresses the importance of measuring events or interactions rather than time on a page. It would be nice to have both but if given the choice, I'd rather have event/interaction data.
I don't think it's false. I have a site with one page, one video. Time on site really is zero seconds.
However, playing the video may trigger an event that allows Google to measure some of the visits.
I have a site that is extremely heavy on front page traffic. Basically 97% of all traffic is front page traffic, and 75% of all traffic is single visit (they hit the front page and nothing else). 55% of traffic does not generate multiple page views on any given day.
I have absolutely no problem with Google reporting 0 second visits. In fact, quite the opposite, Google reports very high visit durations, as visitors tend to spend a lot of time on the front page and then leave. If there were a problem with 0 second counting, it would decimate my time on site numbers due to all the people not generating second page requests for GA to count.
I've been using Google Analytics since they purchased it, and have never run into this problem (across millions of uniques and two dozen sites). The only time I've ever seen 0 second requests on any scale, is from bots, and in that case they're easy to out by looking at flash settings + browser version. If you're seeing a huge number of 0 second requests, it's most likely a bot.