Definition

The average duration visitors spend on a website during a session, measured from arrival to departure or timeout. It's a metric that can't distinguish between engaged reading and forgetting you left a tab open.

Example Usage

Our time on site increased to 14 minutes, though analytics can't tell us if people are genuinely interested or just stuck in an infinite checkout loop.

Origin

Emerged with web analytics platforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s

Fun Fact

Google Analytics can't measure time on site for single-page visits (bounces) since it calculates duration based on the time between page loads.

Source: Web analytics terminology

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See “time on site” in Corporate Speak, Gen-Z Slang, Pirate Speak, and more.

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