Analyzing the impact of traffic source on visit duration

Abstract

Web site performance related to visitor's purchasing decision can be indicated from their visit duration. Traffic sources have different impact on visit duration. The site owner can focus on determining which source of visitor's traffic that has to be increased to improve web site performance, especially visit duration. There are three sources of traffic, namely: direct, referrals, and search. By using the One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) this study will try to find out whether there are differences in visit duration visitors based on three different traffic sources. The results indicated that visit duration of visitors who come from the search traffic source has the shortest time visit, significantly different from the other two sources of traffic. Based on that result, the site owners can focus to increase visitor traffic from direct and referral sources in order to increase web site's visit duration.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BUSINESS, 21(3), 2016 ISSN: 1083-4346
Analyzing the Impact of Traffic Source on
Visit Duration
Adhi Prasetioa, Osa Omar Sharifb, Ilham Perdanac,
Dini Turipanam Alamandad
a Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Jl. Dr Setiabudi No. 229, Bandung, Indonesia
Telkom University, Jl. Telekomunikasi No. 1, Bandung, Indonesia
adhipras@gmail.com
b Telkom University, Jl. Telekomunikasi No. 1, Bandung, Indonesia
osaomarsharif@gmail.com
c Telkom University, Jl. Telekomunikasi No. 1, Bandung, Indonesia
lhamdana@gmail.com
d Telkom University, Jl. Telekomunikasi No. 1, Bandung, Indonesia
aturipanama@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Web site performance related to visitor’s purchasing decision can be indicated from
their visit duration. Traffic sources have different impact on visit duration. The site
owner can focus on determining which source of visitor’s traffic that has to be
increased to improve web site performance, especially visit duration. There are three
sources of traffic, namely: direct, referrals, and search. By using the One-Way
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) this study will try to find out whether there are
differences in visit duration visitors based on three different traffic sources. The
results indicated that visit duration of visitors who come from the search traffic
source has the shortest time visit, significantly different from the other two sources of
traffic. Based on that result, the site owners can focus to increase visitor traffic from
direct and referral sources in order to increase web site’s visit duration.
JEL Classification: M3
Keywords: traffic source; visit duration; stickiness; direct; referral; search

244 Prasetio, Sharif, Perdana, Alamanda
I.
INTRODUCTION
Omidvar et al. (2011) mentioned that direct visitors have higher influence on page
views compared to referral visitors. Their study investigated the effect of traffic
sources consist of direct visitors, referrals visitors and search visitors to the page
views. Laudon and Traver (2009) stated that a page view is the number of pages
viewed by visitors at the site. However, despite the importance of page view metric
mentioned by Burby and Brown (2006), Laudon and Traver (2009) also mentioned
that the metric is not a very useful due to the increased use of web frames that causes
a page can have multiple page views.
Furthermore, Laudon and Traver (2009) suggested other metric to measure the
performance of a web site related to customer's purchase decision called visit
duration. Duration (stickiness) is the average length of time a visitor spent on a web
site. Duration is very important because the longer time visitors are in a web site, the
more likely visitors to take action on the site. The action can be either in the form of
purchases of products or services, become a subscriber, or any other action that
would benefit the owner of the web site. This study aimed to answer the following
research questions:
1. How are visit duration characteristics based on traffic source?
2. Are there differences in visit duration based on traffic source?
With the results of this study, site owners can focus on increasing specific
visitor’s traffic source, especially to improve visitor’s visit duration performance of
the web site.
II.
LITERATURE REVIEW
A. Google Analytics
Omidvar et al. (2011) mentions about a method to measure success rate of a web site
by using time series data as follows “This survey had introduced a methodology to
measure the success of the sites with its time series data. It also focused on one of the
most primary and important variables which are page views and showed how to use
the most suitable data for that. This method can be used on all sites and time series
variables.”
Models offered in that research will be used in this study. One of the steps that
need to be done to improve the success of a website is to measure the degree of
success of a website. Prasetio (2011) in the study of the use of Google Analytics e-
commerce research states that “the data provided by Google Analytics metrics have
adequate types and can be used as a source of research data related to e-commerce.”
Furthermore, he mentions that
“The use of the site as a media sales have different characteristics compared to
other media. The use of a web site enables a more detailed analysis of the success of
a web site to achieve its goal to reach visitors and see its behavior than other sales
media. This can occur because the Internet allows detailed tracking of visitor data
with the help of the software.”

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BUSINESS, 21(3), 2016 245
Tracking data to measure the level of success and performance of a website is
generally done with a software tool known as site management tools or web analytics.
One web analytics service providers is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a tool
that is most widely used to measure the performance of a website. Statistical data of
BuiltWith (2011) shows that in October 2011, Google Analytics is used by 58.04% of
the 100,000 primary site analytics web users in the world with the development trend
of increasing market share. This is consistent with studies of Omidvar et al. (2011)
which uses Google Analytics data as a source of research data.
B. E-Commerce
Laudon and Traver (2009) define E-commerce as the use of the internet especially
one of its most popular service, the web, for business transactions. To support that,
commercial transactions are mostly done digitally between organizations and
individuals. Furthermore, Laudon and Traver (2009) state that revenue Ecommerce
for B2C (Business to Consumer) growing 10-15% per year. Furthermore, Laudon and
Traver (2009) also mentione that according to a survey in America, in 2008, B2C
revenues reached more than $ 250 billion, while the B2B (Business to Business)
already exceeds USD 3 trillion.
C. Site Management Tools
Laudon and Traver (2009) state that the site management tools are very important to
make the site work, and to determine how well a site works. Laudon and Traver
(2009) also mention further that the site management tools can help to understand
customer behavior on a web site, observing the customer purchases more effectively,
observe marketing campaigns, information hits and visits. Site management tools can
also be implemented using web analytics technology to obtain more complete
information.
D. Online Marketing Metrics
The level of success of a website can be measured by using some metric data. Laudon
and Traver (2009) state that there are two groups of metrics used in measuring the
performance of a web site: group metrics that focus on measuring success in
achieving market share website visitors and group metrics that focus on the
conversion rate of visitors into customers.
Furthermore, they mention that some examples of metrics that focus on
measuring market share of visitors to the site include: Impressions (how many
visitors who saw the advertisement), Click-through rate (the ratio between the
number of visitors who click on the number to see an advertisement), View-through
rate (the ratio between the number of visitors that perform a specific action after
some time since seeing an advertisement), Hits (number of http requests are made on
a web site or a web page), Page views (how many page views in a web site),
Stickiness or duration (how much time does a visitor spent on a web site), Unique
visitors (number of unique visitors on a web site), and Loyalty (the number of visitors
who return to a web site, usually expressed in ratio to the number of visitors).

246 Prasetio, Sharif, Perdana, Alamanda
Some examples of metrics that focus on converting visitors into customers
include: conversion rate (the ratio of the number of visitors who take certain actions
in a web site compared to the total number of visitors), browse-to-buy-ratio (the ratio
between the number of purchases compared to product browsed), view- to-cart ratio
(the ratio between the number of shopping cart to how many views of the product),
and cart conversion rate (the ratio between the number of purchases compared to the
amount of the shopping cart).
III.
METHODOLOGY
This research is a comparative quantitative research. Comparative quantitative
research is research that seeks the cause for the difference in behavior or status within
the group (Sekaran, 2011). The subject of this study is the visit duration of
prothelon.com web site’s visitors between July 2009 and June 2012. The data
collection techniques used was experimental methods. Data then analyzed using
statistical tools called one-way ANOVA.
This study compared prothelon.com web site’s visitors duration based on three
sources of traffic: direct traffic, referrals, and search. Levine et.al (2006) state that
One-way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) test two variances under the null
hypothesis (H0) whether the two variances are equal. The first variance is the
variance between groups (among groups) and the second variance is the variance in
each group (within groups). According to Zikmund et al. (2009), it is called one-way
ANOVA for only one independent variable involved (traffic source). Data must be at
least in interval scale, therefore the data in this study meet the requirement since it
used scale ratio data, which level is higher than the interval.
Initial hypothesis for ANOVA is expressed as follows:
H0: μ1 = μ2 = μ3, there is no difference in the average visit duration of the traffic
source that come from direct, referral, or search.
H1: not all μj are the same, there is a difference in the average visit duration of the
traffic source that come from direct traffic, referral, or search, where μ1 is the
average visit duration of the source of direct traffic, μ2 is the average visit
duration of the source of referral traffic, μ3 is the average visit duration of search
traffic source, and j = 1, 2, 3.
Although the hypothesis initially see the difference average between groups,
but the one that tested is the difference of variance between groups (Among groups)
and the variance within each group (Among groups) as stated by Levine et al. (2006).
Variance between groups called Sum of Square among Groups (SSA) and the
variance in each group is called Sum of Square within Groups (SSW). When SSA
value greater than SSW value, the initial hypothesis is not accepted, the alternative
hypothesis is proven. The conclusion is that there are differences in the average visit
duration based on direct traffic sources, referrals, or search.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BUSINESS, 21(3), 2016 247
IV.
RESULT AND DISCUSSION
A. Result
During July 2009 and June 2012, as shown in Table 1, most visitors came from
search traffic sources with an amount of 868.855 visitors, while visitors from the
source of referral traffic is at least with just 42.505 visitors. Although the number of
visitors from search source is the biggest one, but their average visit duration is the
shortest (273.08 seconds), while the longest average visit duration is made by visitors
who come from referral traffic sources (352.72 seconds).
Table 1
Visitors amount
Traffic Source
Total Visitors Amount
(June 2009- July 2012)
Direct
101.764
Referral
42.505
Search
868.855
The results of ANOVA test using SPSS 17, obtained sig. = 0.000 <0.05 then
H1 is proven that there are significant differences in the average visit duration based
on traffic source (see Table 2). Based on result comparison from Tukey-Kramer
Multiple Comparison Table shown in Table 3, visit duration of search traffic sources
(traffic source number 3) proved to be significantly different in visit duration
compared the other two traffic sources (direct and referrals). On the other hand, the
duration of the visit direct traffic and referral traffic sources are not proven to have a
significant difference.
Table 2
Visit duration Anova test result
Sum of Squares
df
Mean Square
F
Sig.
Between Groups
Within Groups
Total
143259.796
206763.194
350022.991
2
105
107
71629.898
1969.173
36.376
.000
Table 3
Visit duration Tukey-Kramer multiple comparison table
(I) Traffic Source
(J) Traffic Source
Mean Difference (I-J)
Sig.
1
2
3
-5.00
74.64*
.882
.000
2
1
3
5.00
79.64*
.882
.000
3
1
2
-74.64*
-79.64*
.000
.000
* The mean difference is significant at the 0.05 level

248 Prasetio, Sharif, Perdana, Alamanda
B. Discussion
Chaffey (2009) mentioned that Stickiness is “an indication of how long a visitor stays
on-site” and can be measured using duration and page views. This study showed that
there are differences in visitor stickiness especially average visit duration among
various traffic source. This result consistent with Omidvar et al. (2011) and Prasetio
et al. (2013) findings that used Page views to measure stickiness.
The results also showed that the average visit duration from search engine
traffic source is significantly lower than the referral and direct. Referral visitors are
visitors from other sites where the sites usually have some content relevancy with the
destination site. This relevancy means that visitors will find relevant information
according to their needs. The level of relevance of the information obtained will
make visitors stay longer in a web site.
Direct traffic is traffic that does not originate from search-engine results or a
referring link in a domain for example visitors who use a bookmark or type a web
site’s URL into his or her browser due to off line interactions (Park, 2009). For that
reason, direct visitors are visitors who are already familiar with a web site. They are
visitors who have found information that are relevant to their needs at the sites
visited. That relevancy will lead to long visit duration of a web site. Google’s
explanation also implies that some direct visitors are returning visitors who already
visited the web site before. Wang et al. (2010) showed that returning visitors has
significantly more interactions toward a web site which is consistent with this study’s
result.
On the other hand, search visitors are visitors coming from search engines.
Search engine visitors visit a website based on the keywords they type in a search
engine. In general, search visitors decided to visit a website solely based on short
information provided in the search engine results. This, sometimes, can lead to
irrelevant information. If the keywords and content of the linked web site are
relevant, the visit duration will be long, but if it is not relevant, then visitors will
quickly return to the search engine to continue the search to other sites.
Irrelevant keywords will bring down the average duration of visitors coming
from search engines. The low average visit duration of search visitors is an indication
that the keywords used by visitors are mostly have not been relevant to the
information on a website. So investigate this further, we need to do future research to
study the relationship between duration and the relevance of the keyword. Omidvar et
al. (2011) in their study mentions that "In order to understand search behavior
visitors, their quarries should be understood meaning which is available through
semantic web technologies." The study also shows that the meaning of a keyword
needs to be understood in order to understand the behavior of search visitors.
V.
CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATION
A. Conclusion
The average duration of referral visitors was the highest compared to other traffic
source at 352.72 seconds followed by direct visitors (347.72 seconds) and search
visitors (273.08 seconds). There were no significant difference between the duration

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BUSINESS, 21(3), 2016 249
of the referral visitors and direct visitors, but the duration of search visitors have a
significant difference compared to the duration of the other traffic sources.
B. Implication
The results showed that referral visitors had a high average duration. The owner of
the web site can focus to multiply referral links from other relevant sites. Henceforth,
it is necessary to conduct further research to determine whether there is any
difference between search visitors from relevant and not relevant keywords.
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