Can Cyfin Reporter tell me how long somebody has been online?
A4. No, and be careful of products that say they can. The reason is simple. The fact that a user downloaded a Web page to a browser doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she was actually looking at that page while it was “open.” After all, the user could have suddenly received a phone call, gone to lunch, attended a short-notice meeting, been interrupted by a colleague, or gone to the restroom. Also, users typically have more than one page “open” at a time, but only one is truly viewable, and there is no technical way to know which one. When a computer user clicks on a URL, that action merely constitutes a one-time request for a document, and the “connection” with the server is immediately broken. There is no “session,” no end-of-session, and no possibility of measuring duration. Because of these variables, the default time for a Web page “visit” in reports has been set to 3 seconds. This is the approximate minimum amount of time it takes to load a Web page. Read more about the importanc
