Analyzing the Impact of Traffic Source on Visit Duration

I. INTRODUCTIONOmidvar 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 REVIEWA. Google AnalyticsOmidvar 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 resea rch 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 t han other sales media. This can occur because the Internet allows detailed tracking of visitor data with the help of the software. "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-CommerceLaudon 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 orga nizations 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. …