Virtual Tour Search Rankings Question: "Time on page" and "Session Duration"

[JBShope]

Hi,
Does being in and looking around a single panorama effect the Google Analytics "Time on Page" report? As in it shows a definitively longer time on a specific web page while viewing that panorama?

How does someone browsing a client's self-hosted Pano2VR tour effect the client's GA "Session Duration" reports?

Does being in the tour contiguously/continuously looking at multiple panoramic points in a tour effect those GA "Time on Page" and "Session Duration" reports?

My interest in this is showing clients that hosting tours on their own website domain (via Pano2VR) has significant "Search Engine Advantages" over 3rd party "cloud" hosting of the tours, maybe...?

Regards,
~jim

[Hopki]

Hi jim,
Having a self hosted tour on your website means you can add Google Analytics to the HTML page.
This in itself will not do much but there is some evidence to suggest that this will encourage more Google crawler activity.
This can not be a bad thing.

Im no expert but I would suggest that having a link to a page is far better than a link to an external frame.
Maybe others know more about this subject.
Regards,
Hopki

[JBShope]

Thanks Hopki, hopefully others have some insight into real world feedback from their own install of Google Analytics. From further reading these are useful measurements but can be misleading because of the way they calculate those times. It looks like Google Tag Manager and tags/events is the thing to be looking into to break down the user navigation properly.

Regards,
~jim