I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine from SIPA.

Harry had read a statistic that people are spending less and less time on newspaper sites. (I don’t know if this is what he’d read, but along those lines see Average Time Spent on Top 30 Newspaper Web Sites Declines — More Than Half Fall)

Harry thinks that time on the site is more important than the number of visitors, and I think he’s probably right. We talked about it for a while, and then I came up with the following.

Every website has a purpose, and webmasters ought to have clear goals for their sites. Your average SIPA-member website will probably have goals something like this.

1. Get a visitor in the first place
2. Get the visitor to a second page (i.e., not bounce)
3. Get the visitor to return
4. Sign up / register in some way (e-mail newsletter, forum, whatever)
5. Buy something (probably something small)
6. Buy something else (up- or cross-sell)

Goals 3 through 6 should be cross-referenced to the time the user spends on the site. IOW, of the people who spent more than X minutes on the site, how many returned, signed up or bought something?

If those stats bear out what both Harry and I expect they do (that people who spend more time on the site are more likely to complete site goals), then a good strategy would be …

1. Find the pages that people spend the most time on,
2. Make more of that type of page, and
3. Make sure those pages are optimized towards your site goals.