I must admit, this subject has always fascinated me. Like the majority of people out there, my time is short and my attention span even shorter, especially when I have a gazillion things left to do.

“On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely” - Source http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

This is quite an interesting statistic and I know it’s true from the stats of my ebay listings.

“Among other things, the authors found that the Back button is now only the 3rd most-used featureBack to become the second-most used feature. The reason for this change is the increased prevalence of applications and feature-rich Web pages that require users to click page buttons to access their functionality on the Web. Clicking hypertext links remains the most-used feature, but clicking buttons (on the page) has now overtaken” - Source http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

What I’ve also found is that the time people spend on different listings with lots of text, audio, video, useful info varies a great deal. In fact my most important discovery is that my visitors spend up to three times as long on my auction pages if I provide short video clips. They also seem to return more frequently, though only for a few seconds. This leads me to believe that people take in small chunks of info on a variety of auction pages, and then they revisit those pages to compare, clarify and seek unanswered questions.

In some cases, I find people will revisit the same auction page every 10-20 mins then on the 4th or 5th visit they either “watch” the listing or “purchase”, why this happens is beyond me?

With this info in mind I’m having to completely change all of my listings 1 by 1 depending on the stats. For example, if the item does what is says on the tin and is fairly basic, people generally don’t need to seek further info, whereas if you’re in a extremely competitive niche they seem to view a considerable amount more auctions and then return for clarification on something.

Stay tuned, since I’m in the process of writing a free short report on tracking your visitors and what you can do with the info!

Your views are welcome!

DesDrec.

Stumble it!