The Role of Web Analytics in Digital Marketing

  What is Visit Duration? Visit duration or average session duration is one of the top metrics measured by marketers. This metric tells a business how engaged their visitors are by measuring the amount of time a visitor spends on a website. Google Analytics defines a session as a visit to a website, the session starts when a user visits the site and continues until they exit or when the session has become inactive after 30 minutes. It is important to note that the average session time is different than average time on a page in that it measures the entire session, not just the time spent on one specific page (Albright, 2021). In the Google Analytics platform this measurement can be found by going to Audience and then to Overview. Figure 1 below illustrates a screen shot image of a website’s Avg. Session Duration from Google Analytics. Figure 1: Avg. Session Duration (Albright, n.d.) What Story Does Visit Duration Tell a Business? Getting visitors to a website is just the beginning

  What are Conversion Rates? Conversion rates are a crucial metric for any business owner to measure on their website. A conversion occurs anytime a website visitor performs a specific action. Conversions are usually tied to call to action such as; asking a website visitor to sign up for a newsletter, download a PDF, install an app, make a purchase or order a free trial. A conversion rate measures the success of a specific campaign by calculating the percentage of users who performed the conversion associated with the specific campaign. A marketer would measure the total numbers of users who performed the desired and action and divide this by the total audience they intended to target to calculate conversion rate (Adjust, n.d.). Figure 1 below illustrates how a conversion rate would be calculated for a business whose campaign goal was purchase conversions and a target audience of 50. Figure 1: Conversion Rate Calculation (Madhuranjan, n.d.) It’s obvious to any business owner that con