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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.