Average time on site vs average time on page

[user70977]

What is the difference between average time on site and average time on page if we're just looking at 1 page url? I see slightly difference in the time for each metric, so I want to understand what's the difference between what the 2 and what are the use cases?

Average time on page makes sense but I'm confused on average time on site.

Based on the definitions, to my understanding average time on site = (total seconds spent)/(# of sequences)

average time on page = (total seconds spent)/(# of pageviews)

[Harveer_SinghGi1 · Accepted solution]

Hi @user70977 ,

The metric average time on page should not be available (unless you have created a calculated metric) as Adobe has deprecated time on page metrics and suggests to use time on site metric instead.

Coming to the metric definitions you used, difference is coming from the denominator used in both of these calculations, for a page value a sequences is incremented by only 1 if the same value is recorded in conjunctive hits (e.g. page reloads), while a page view is counted every time a page value is recorded in the pages dimension.

As explained in detail in Average time on site documentation, below visit will generate 2 sequences and 4 page views for page value "Product page A",

Now to calculate the averages, lets take the amount of time lapsed between hits for page value "Product page A":

• 12:04:20 - 12:05:30 - 1 minute 10 seconds
• 12:05:30 - 12:07:00 - 1 minute 30 seconds
• 12:07:40 - 12:08:10 - 30 seconds
• 12:25:40 - ? - Not included

The total amount of time spent for Product page A is 190 seconds, now if we calculate the averages they'd result as below,

average time on site = (total seconds spent)/(# of sequences) = 190/2 = 00:01:35

average time on page = (total seconds spent)/(# of pageviews) = 190/4 = 00:00:47

You can verify this easily by removing all the repeat instances from you report which makes the sequences and page views for a page value same. To do this you can turn off "Count repeat instances" setting in Workspace > Project > Project Info & settings and check the data, both the metrics should match,

Cheers!