1 reply to this topic

[JayMcDonald]

I have tried setting up two advanced segments - one for page visits that last less than 2 minutes, and one for those lasting more than two. But the UI is confusing, and unclear on how it wants the time formatted. It says [Include] [Time on Page] [Greater than] and then a blank text input. I don't know if it wants "2" or "2:00" or "120" or what. I have tried different options, but I am getting weird results. When I look at a page, I will see X number of visitors in the > 2 min segment, but then the average Time on Page for that segment will be something like 1:37 - which makes no mathematical sense. How can the average of numbers greater than 2 minutes come out less that 2 minutes?

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[Amin Shawki]

Not sure if my images copied over correctly the first time, so i deleted that post and am trying this again...

Hey Jay,

I have this same problem, but I think I understand why we are stuck.

First, when typing in the blank text box, I'm pretty sure that number is for seconds. So for example, if you wanted to use 3 hours, you need to figure out the seconds to type in (it'd be 3hours*60minute
s*60seconds= 10800).

However, the bigger issue is that advanced segments do not have a way to segment the "AVERAGE time on page" metric. There is an option for the "Time on Page" metric which is total time on page (not average). So these are 2 different metrics, and advanced segments appear to only have the option to track "Time on Page", not the average. Unfortunately, it still doesn't work for me. See attachment 1 for my advanced segment, and attachment 2 for what I see in my report... huge contradiction.




However, there is a quick fix but it's not permanent and doesn't involve advanced segments. Above your data report table, if you use the Advanced Search Filter option, you can then correctly segment the data based off average time on page and/or time on page. See attachments 3 and 4 below and sorry for the crude arrows.




This did the trick for me, but again there isn't a way to save this filter without altering all your incoming traffic and data.

Hope this helps, shoot over to our website blog for more analytics help or ping me! Infotrustllc.com/blog

Now I feel I need to contradict myself again!

I stepped away to grab some lunch, came back after 15-20 minutes to my GA and refreshed. Then I found some weird occurances. In the exact same view on 2 different computers, I started to see different results. For the advanced segment [Exclude][Time on Page][Greater than][600] (see image), I saw the following 2 results on 2 different computers.





A few guesses to why this happened:

• Advanced segments take a few minutes to fully take effect, especially on A LOT of data such as the site I am testing this on (more than 2 million monthly visits). This would explain the overlap in data but still the contradiction
• My computers were lagging somehow (unlikely)