Measuring online time on website

Question

I would like to measure how much time a user spends on my website. It\'s needed for a community site where you can say: \"User X has been spending 1397 minutes here.\"

A

Answer 1

Two factors are working against you -

1. You can only collect point-in-time statistics (page views), and there's no reasonable way to detect what happened between those points;

2. Even then, you'd be counting browser window time, not user time; users can easily have multiple tabs open on multiple browser instances simultaneously.

I suspect your best approximation is attributing some average amount of attention time per click and then multiplying. But then you might just as well measure clicks.