Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions

[seo_plus]

Hi,

Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media.

Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes.

And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere.

Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month.

Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly?

Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used.

If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates?

There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking.

Am I crazy?   Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory?

as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here.

We already know that low engagement = low ranking.

Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking?

Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!

[katemorris]

Question, as it was entirely clear in the original question (or I missed it) and I think addressed later ... but if people are coming in and viewing the video without clicking anything (think youtube) then leave, then the time on site and page are not going to register. Is that happening here?

Now to the questions of if engagements rate get better in GA, if that can impact ranking. I have seen no studies on that and I highly doubt Google ties things in your GA account to ranking. Too many people mess up implementations for that. But I have not seen proof either way.

Now, Dwell, or whatever you want to call it, the instance where a user clicks on a result and within a relatively short period of time (as I think it depends on the query) goes back to the same SERP, I think that is taken into account, or is being investigated. That's Google's own data and totally possible to use. Do they? I am not sure and have seen no proof.

[seo_plus]

Thanks for your thoughts.

Been through it all, been doing a thorough site audit for the last couple of months. (that's what I do!)

Ghost and referral spam is somethign that I am very familiar with but it is well less than 1% of all hits.

Fortunately, on this site, it is well in the minority.  I see it on other sites and it is nasty there but not an issue here.

I've been solving canonicals, dead ends, low engagement pages, improving pages (many) etc.  And with this site there are indeed thousands of issues to deal with, for sure - but this is not the largest site I've worked on, not by a long shot.

This one has been fun.  Been doing it for over 10 years on dozens of sites of all sizes.

Time on site is up strongly (generally), as is conversion and general engagement figures.

But those long form media items are still showing extremely poor engagement despite low bounce rates. and I know the system is not tracking them as I am one of my own "customers".  I've been actually viewing this content for several months myself, and where I know I'm viewing 30 + 60 minute media for sure, GA is still only recording 2 or 3 minutes each time - and I can clearly see this in the GA data.

Let me give you another clue - many of these items have a zero bounce rate and a zero time on page and 100% exits - (keep in mind the media is many minutes long) what do these telling numbers suggest to you?

...yet despite all this I'm doing, ranking is simply staying near norms - although it is starting to fluctuate more widely than prior norms it is still where it is - and I'm tracking ranking for thousands of terms using 3 different systems.

Normally, I'd be seeing a fairly solid increase after all I've done.

Love to see if we can actually answer the original question if at all possible.

Can poorly configured GA cause low engagement in such a way that if it is fixed, might higher engagement figures drive increasing ranking??

Didn't DWELL get discussed here quite thoroughly?

for backgrounders, this cites Dr Pete.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/understanding-impact-dwell-time-seo/108905/

[seomozinator]

Hello, my friend.

Have you heard about referral spam and ghost hits? This might be your answer to unreal numbers. Here is a post about it: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

Also, as it was mentioned above, good DA/PA doesn't mean or guarantee rankings. What about 10000 other things SEO is about?

Also, is time on page the only problem child? everything else is fine? It sounds that you need good analysis of google analytics data.

[seo_plus]

I understand the inverse relationship and there is no question that in reality, there are few that would engage for tens of minutes, just due to the nature of behavior - and the averages bear that out.

But when looking very carefully at this only segment, I would expect more than fractions of a percent to spend more than a mere minute.

Your example shows a 10% view rate (like what we see) and 1800 minutes total use.

In our case, in this exact scenario, GA is only showing about 6 minutes total use.

I think that GA is undercounting dwell time by a reasonably large margin.

That said, stating the question more clearly:

Could it be possible that insufficient or incorrect information regarding actual dwell time on the site might be a factor in the abysmal ranking of this site?

[Lumina]

There are a few different points here that I think are prudent to make:

• Having a good/great domain authority has no bearing on the actual quality of the content regarding users. I would be hesitant about making decisions based on two non-correlative data points. Quality in this context refers to the value the average user perceives that content to have.

• As such, here's an example: Say I have a page hosting a video that's 90 minutes. If 1,000 people visit the page, let's say that 100 came there with an actual interest specifically in that video. Of those 100, maybe 20 will watch the entire thing. So, 20 out of 1,000 people getting to 90 minutes isn't going to give you a high average. This is obviously an abstract example, but it makes the point that video length means nothing as a metric without any insight into these other key numbers.

• That said, yes, Google is imperfect and won't measure anything perfectly. But a general rule for content of any type is to expect only a certain percentage (usually not very high) to be highly engaged. It's an inverse curve structure in terms of graphical representation.