What is Internet browse time?

You can generate both presentation and investigative reports showing Internet browse time, the estimated amount of time a user spent accessing websites. No software program can tell the exact amount of time that someone spends viewing a site once it is open. One person might open a site, view it for a few seconds, and then take a business call before requesting another site. Someone else might spend several minutes reading a site in detail before moving to the next one.

A Log Database job (see Web protection reporting database jobs) calculates browse time based on configurable parameters. This job runs once a day, so browse time information can lag the actual log data.

For browse time calculations:

• An Internet session begins when a user opens a browser and continues as long as that user requests additional websites at least every 3 minutes (by default).

  If you want to change the read time threshold, see Configuring Internet browse time options.

• The Internet session ends when more than 3 minutes pass before the user requests another site.
• A new session begins if the user makes additional requests after more than 3 minutes. Commonly, a user’s browse time consists of multiple sessions each day.

The database job calculates the total time of each session, starting with the time of the first request and ending 3 minutes after the last request.