What is “Time-On-Site”?
Time-on-site is a measure of how long a user satys on your website, typically in a measure of minutes and seconds. The measurement is most often an average of visitor behavior over a period of time (monthly most often).
If Google Analytics tells you that your Time On Site for last month was 2:38, this means the average person who visited your website spent 2 minutes and 38 seconds looking around.
Who Cares?
Time On Site is a valuable metric for determining the quality of your website traffic. It is generally accepted that it a good thing to have visitors spend more time on your website; the longer the better. Longer visits can infer a more engagaed shopper, and, at the very least, your logo has spent more time in fron of their eyes.
Time On Site can be used to measure broad improvements in your website. For example, adding video to a site that previously had none will often increase the Time On Site, as some user will stay longer to watch video.
Best Use
The most effective use of Time On Site is to measure the quality of the traffic you’re buying. Instead of looking at the Time On Site metric for your entire website, look at it in your “Traffic Sources” report of Google Analytics. It’s in this report that you’ll see the average Time On Site for visitors who came from Google, the average Time on Site for visitors who arrived from a Zillow.com ad, and so on. It’s not uncommon to find an ad that seems worth the money (because it’s sending you lots of visits), but the average Time On Site is only a few seconds. This means you’re paying money for very low quality visits.
Direct more ad dollars to sources sending you high quality visits.
