Hey Marketers – Time is Now on Your Side…or is It?

Nielsen/Net Ratings announced early last week that it would shift its chief criterion focus on its Top Web Brands rankings from pages viewed to the time users spend on a site. They believe it is more important to measure user engagement within the site (hence, more engaging the site the more time they spend on it), than the number of pages they view.

Let’s go over what I think are the benefits and drawbacks for using the newest metric, time spent on site over its senior, page views:

Benefits (Time Spent on Site):

1.) Brand Affinity -
We all learned about brand affinity back in our college marketing days. Once you have established brand equity (added value to a brand) with your consumers you can move on to create brand affinity; an emotional, yet rational bond between your brand and consumer. Therefore, the more time spent on a site the more likely your visitors are becoming more emotionally attached to and involved with your site and your brand, and the more likely they will become your most loyal consumer. They become interactive, contribute content or participate in other ways on the site – therefore keeping a watchful marketers’ eye on visitors’ time spent on your site is imperative.

2.) Time is Money –
It is just that simple. The more time you spend on an eCommerce site, the more likely you will spend money there. Think of any online retailer – you click on an item to place in your digital shopping bag and five more recommended items will be listed to the side. So why not just click on them? There’s a free shipping deal after $100 spent anyway! Enticing I must say – I mean, who’s dog can’t live without the matching pink embroidered sweater?

Drawbacks (Time Spent on Site):

1.) Scammers –
I can see it now – a company wants to rank high so it creates an extremely unfriendly user interface with slow navigation and fluidity in an unfair effort to artificially increase the time spent on site. This would bump up a user’s time on site, not because it’s fun, explorative, and functional but because it’s hard to navigate through and understand. For example, let’s say that my site is more difficult to navigate through than your site; does that mean I will rank higher because of my lack of a clean, usable interface? I can see the torches now.

2.) Inactive Sessions –
How often do you leave your desk for a meeting or a phone call, while staying logged into a particular site? Or maybe you only leave for a few minutes from your session on a page (obviously not interacting with the site but still on the page), eventually return, and continue. Sitting idle on a site is another way time on site can be artificially inflated.

These are all factors marketers must consider when looking at and reporting various types of measurements. Don’t be too narrow in your reports and remember that report measurements & criterion will forever evolve – at least at this time.