Average Time on Page negative

[Jordanmn]

Hi,

I am trying to look at average time on a specific page and when I do- I noticed some pages get negative values. I am thinking it is potentially because it is a visit level, but wondering if anyone has seen something similar with OOTB metrics?

Metric: Average time on Page = (total seconds spent)/(Page views-exits))

Freeform setup: Page name & Average time on page

If I change the dimension to day, the negatives go away, but they return when page name or page URL is utilized. I have also broken out by metric within (exits, page views) and am seeing exits>page views in some instances. How would this be possible?

Thanks!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I've not seen this myself.. but "Average TIme Spent" is a calculated metric that is supposed to apply only to pages.. I am not sure why you would see this on "Page Name" (unless Page Name is a custom eVar that also includes actions as well as pages in your implementation)... the same goes for trying to break down by "exits"... A lot of the oddities could be trying to mix a metric which only has context for page views and applying it to dimensions that are part of actions....

[MandyGeorge · Accepted solution]

I was going to say I've never seen this happen either, but @Jennifer_Dungan's comment gave me a thought. I replicated the metric that you made and put it against 'page' - the default page name dimension, and 'page name' - our evar version.

For the default page name dimension, I didn't get any negative numbers. But when I did it against the evar version of the page name, I was able to replicate the issue. Because the evar version fires against not only page views, but custom link instances, it's possible to have more exits than page views, thus creating a negative number. There's a few examples in my screenshot below.

So probably the easiest fix for this is to use the default page name dimension that doesn't fire against custom link instances. Page URL would likely give the same problem if it's firing on the custom link instances and not just the page load call too.