Nov
Why Measuring Time On Site Is Important
Everything on the internet revolves around traffic generation and conversion. It does not matter what type of site you have, from a personal blog to a website selling tractor parts. You need visitors to come to your site, and then take some sort of action which is desirable, which is considered a conversion. Conversion may mean a purchase transaction, it might mean downloading a report, or it might mean reading the latest article that has just been posted.
One of the often overlooked metrics is the time spent on a site. This is generally broken down into two broad categories, time spent by new visitors, and time spent by repeat visitors. But why do we actually care about time? It is actually one of the most important metrics we have to measure the effectiveness of both the presentation (how the site looks and is laid out) and the content it contains.
When a website is new, almost all visitors will be new visitors. If you noticed that the average visit was 3 seconds, what does that tell you? It tells you someone sees the site and immediately leaves. This means you need to make some changes ASAP. It might be your layout, or it might be your content. If you are using advertising dollars to drive traffic, every time someone comes to your site and immediately leaves, that is money wasted. This would additionally tell you to check the wording of your advertising banners to make sure the message you are broadcasting lines up with the message your site is portraying to the public.
The time on site measurement gets even better when it comes to repeat visitors and measuring conversions. Repeat visitors are great for any site, especially if you are an ecommerce site. It means that buyers like your products and design and are coming back for more. Watching the time spent on site by repeat visitors helps you tailor new content, and see what areas are attracting them to come back. Time to conversion is another metric which is important. This is the average amount of time spent on the website by anyone who then converts, or performs a desired action. Watching this over time helps you improve your branding image. The better your design, and the better your brand image, the lower this number goes. For an ecommerce site, this means vistors come to the site specifically to buy your products. They do not spend much time browsing around and needing to be convinced to buy. This is the holy grail in internet marketing.
Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.Related posts:
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A new layout and fresh content can improve the time on site, but also you need to target a specific audience, and tailor your content accordingly. It’s better to address to a smaller group than to everyone.
I have noticed this more and more lately. I have been using a plug in call slim-stat that allows me to follow that. and measure my bounce rate a little better than with Google analytics. It made me think a bit harder on how my front page was laid out.
Time is indeed a very vital metric for websites, Justin. Every marketer should focus some of their efforts on knowing this, so they know what can be done to make their sites better. I am using Google Analytics myself and is always on the lookout of other software that could help me out on this. Thanks for sharing this insightful content.
It really does help with your google ranking and anything to do with google you should pay attention to as much as possible, the necessary evil that it is…
nice info, some times we cannot say about a specific design that people like that and people visit the site due to its design, i personally know many blogger who did not make their sites colorful or no colorful graphics people come their just to their good articles.
nice information, but we can not determine exactly how long when we open that website..
Information in the post is very correct. Its a very important metric to understand the visual appearance of your website. Are the visitors really attracted by the appearance or the information can be easily defined by this metric and required measures can be taken to improve it.!
Justin, Thank you for the post.
You are right on the money with the visitor 3 second rule. It does say there is a reason they are leaving right away. There is something you need to fix, and fast. Or, you will not last long.
I find here how to Measuring Time On Site Is Important?
I still do not understand, whether there is a problem with the time the visitors? What the disadvantages?
repeatedly visit could boost ratings, right?
but how do we know the time is all it takes?
It is very important to do time measurement. If someone shows up on site for say 2 seconds, then it is just long enough for them to leave right out.
The disadvantages are that your rankings will not rise you want visitors to stay on your site for as long as possible you want to engage them and make them want more. The longer they are on your site the more time you have to complete what you set up the website to do.
Sometimes long dwell times could mean that users can’t find something on the page.