This, in many ways, indicates that marketing leadership is still confused about what they want their web assets to do. They are still captivated by the shiny lights and chrome-plated doo-dads that allow them to show the market that they have "it" and that the competition is nothing but tech dullards.
But at the core of it, and to put a very fine point on it, our job in marketing is to make the cash register ring, to make it ring more often for more profitable stuff, and to position the company to do this again and again and again. And that activity is reflected in our sites' conversion rate - one of the last things with which marketing leaders concerned themselves.
Conversions can take many forms, it doesn't have to be all about online commerce and selling some bauble. Perhaps a conversion is downloading a useful PDF or requesting a presentation. But Time-on-Site and it's twin Pageviews tell me relatively little, by themselves. For instance, TOS provides no insight into whether or not visitors find their visit experience to be rewarding, frustrating, or just inconvenient. Perhaps they're on site for sixteen minutes because the marketing team has done a poor job of providing key information. Or maybe the visitor went to lunch while visiting the site and just left the browser open to this page. Who knows? But because we know nothing about the user's experience or their future intentions, we have no data with which to improve our chances of making a sale.
I tell my clients to think of their site as another channel through which they can reach out to the customer, much like a brick and mortar channel partner might have been twenty years ago - but with far more control and responsiveness. Now, would we want to spend money supporting a distributor-funded event that did nothing to bring us closer to converting prospects into customers? Or even keeping customers as customers for as long as possible? We'd be hard pressed to justify large expenditures for that sort of nebulous activity. So why would we be so cavalier with our site?
So keep your eye on the prize and don't get conned into looking at metrics that might be easier to manipulate but don't necessarily relate to making more money. After all, increasing TOS is easy, increasing revenue, not so much.
