New thoughts on Time Spent web metric or ‘Exposure Time’ on HispanicTips

Recently, Nielson adopted a new metric for websites, Time Spent on Site, dropping Page Views (articles here and here). Now this may mean something to some of you or not, but it intrigued me and is a pretty big deal for websites. You see last week, I changed my Mero Mero sponsorship level from annual to daily to try something new and because of this I thought I would look into what this metric showed for HispanicTips. I went straight to Google Analytics for all the numbers used in the calculations below as I have been using it as my main web statistics package for quite a while now. Since I was thinking in terms of the Mero Mero sponsorship, I calculated by day and week and called the resulting number ‘Exposure Time.’ To put it mildly, the results surprised me.

• Average Business Day Exposure Time: 148.8 HOURS
  I calculated that there were 1880 average visitors per business day last week (7/16/07 to 7/20/2007) multipled that by 4.75 minutes (4:45 average time on site per visitor for this period) to come up with 8,930 average minutes per day visitors spent on HispanicTips that comes out to 148.8 hours per day of visitor viewage/usage. 148.8 hours of exposure time is like getting 17,860 30 second commercials but instead of 17,860 people seeing your 30 second commercial only once, it would be as if 1880 people saw your commercial 9.5 times.
• Weekly Total Exposure Time: 884 HOURS
  I saw that HispanicTips had 11,430 visitors for a week (7/16/07 to 7/22/2007) and multipled that by 4.65 minutes (4:39 average time on site per visitor for this period) to come up with a total of 53,010 minutes per week visitors spent on HispanicTips that comes out to 884 hours of visitor viewage/usage per week. 884 hours of exposure time is equivalent to 106,020 30 second commercials but instead of 106,020 people seeing your 30 second commercial only once, it would be as if 11,430 people would see your commercial 9 times.
• Average Exposure Time Per Pageview: 2:24 minutes
  For the Average Business Day (7/16/07 to 7/20/2007) there was an average of 4.75 minutes (4:45 average time on site per visitor for this period) dividing this by 1.95 Average Pageview per Visit cones out to 2.4 minutes of Average Exposure Time Per Pageview Per Business Day. For the week 7/16/07 to 7/22/2007 there was an average of 4.65 minutes (4:39 average time on site per visitor for this period) dividing this by 1.93 Average Pageview per Visit comes out to 2.4 minutes for Average Exposure Time Per Pageview over a week.
• How much is 148 or 884 hours worth of Exposure Time to a national Hispanic y Latino audience worth i.e. a Mero Mero sponsorship?
  How about only $100/day and $500/week. This is a steal especially since this level offers 2 big images on every page (a 728×90 graphic at the top and a 120×600 graphic in the right hand column) plus a large graphic in the newsletter that goes out to an additional 1500 people.
• For OrO Sponsorships this means:
  That on average each time when your image/ad or name appears on HispanicTips, it will be visible for 2:24 minutes or almost 5 30 second commercials worth of time.So even if your ad is displayed only once a day over a year your ad would be viewed (based on the above average) for 876 minutes or 14.6 hours that is equivalent to 1,752 30 second commercials all for between $100 and $500.

I have compared web ads to commercials and although I know that this isn’t a perfect analogy, you get the idea. I can’t imagine how I would compare this to an ad in a print publication, a press release or other forms of advertising.

Tomás

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