Time on Site, or TOS, is a measure of how long a visitor spends on your page.

The reason we measure this is so that we can determine whether individual product ads are contributing valuable traffic to your site.

Some of the traffic you receive is valuable, but not all of it. Many visitors will bounce within a few seconds. A visitor who arrives from a comparison shopping engine and spends a long time on your product page, is far more valuable than a visitor who leaves after 2 seconds.

Many analytics solutions, Google Analytics included, measure the time between page-views, rather than the actual time the visitor spent on site. While this is a valuable metric, it doesn’t allow accurate measuring of bounces. The result of this is that the “Average Duration” metric offered by these analytics solutions can’t be used to determine the true value of the traffic a channel is generating for you.

AdCurve can measure the actual Time on Site, and can give you a picture of how valuable the visits from a particular product ad or channel, and what they are contributing to orders.

Note: The TOS we display is a median average rather than a mean average, this is to ensure that extremely long page visits for an inactive tab do not skew results. This is why AdCurve typically reports much shorter durations than your analytics solutions might.