Total Time Spent on Site Metrics Use Cases

Yeah, I agree with the assessment that the documentation isn't all that helpful...

So before we dive into the metric, let's start by looking at how Adobe collects the time spent... because this is not a heartbeat system, Adobe really just calculates the time spent based on the timestamp of the hits:

Example:

• Page A - timestamp 10:03:45
• Page B - timestamp 10:05:05
• Page C - timestamp 10:06:56

The time spent on Page A is calculated by taking the timestamp of Page B and subtracting the timestamp of Page A... so 10:05:05 - 10:03:45 resulting 1 min 20 seconds

Page B is the same, taking the timestamp from Page C and subtracting Page B (10:06:56 - 10:05:05 = 1 min 51 seconds)

Page C.. well, that one is interesting, because without any more timestamps, Adobe has nothing to calculate with... so there is no time collected for Page C in this instance.

Now, onto the metrics, are you looking for "Total" time, or "Average" time?

There is a Total Second Spent metric, and a bunch of Average Time metrics all based off of the same calculated times.

All of these can work with different breakdowns, though some do work better than others (or at least used to.. it may have been fixed, and the issues only came up under certain circumstances that I can't recall at the moment)... without any filtering, you will see that the metrics come out to the same value, except for the Time Spent per Visitor (this one stitches together multiple visits for a visitor and it will look higher. (the last is just converted into second instead of showing as a timestamp):

(The column headers are showing the daily average)

When you break these down by pages, you will see that the values still match, but that the column headers are now an average based on the page)

Now, when you start using Segments, the column headers become "absolute total" so it's no longer averaging across your segments:

So if you have Segment A and Segment B and Segment C, and you need to average them, you will have to create a calculated average (or Mean) for the rows.....

But really, you can use either depending on how you want to use the data. If you are interested in Visitor averages, the you should use the Time Spent per Visitor (seconds), the Time Spent per Visit (seconds) is focused more on the Visit level...  the other two, Average Time on Site and Average Time Spent on Site (seconds) usually match.

Now, on top of this, if you don't like the data to be displayed in seconds, there is an easy fix for this. You can create a calculated metric and just change the display of the data:

I hope this helped