How does Average Time Spent on Site differ from Time Spent per Visit?

[jakubl3000]

Thank you in advance to anybody who will try to help me! Basically my question is quite simple, it relates to this article - Time Spent  - and mainly I would like to know, which metric is currently best used to currently output time users spend on a particular page (when using the pages dimension). Based on the article I concluded that it is - Average time spent on site - is this correct?

A further question then is maybe an explanation, lets say I break down a report by pages, and I get 80secs for an item using 'average time spend on site' metric and 120secs for metric 'Time spent per visit'. Am I correctly interpreting that the first is basically the average time users spend on that particular page (in that dimension's line item) and the second is average that the visits who visited that page at some point spend on the entire site? If you could please advise if I understood this correctly I would be thankful.

Thanks for any help with both questions!

Regards,

Jakub

[laetizia_w · Accepted solution]

average time spend on site - is depending on which dimension you are usinga and counts the total time divided by the sequences

time spent per visit= time spent/visits

Visit --> page a, page b, page a, page a --> all pages 1 second

average time spent on site for a= 3 seconds divided by 2 sequences = 1,5 seconds

time spent per visit for a = 3 secondes divided by 1 visit = 3 seconds.

This is how it gets calculated

[jakubl3000]

Thanks Laetizia. Your example really helped.

Cheers,

Jakub