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Discussion on: Google I/O Announcements

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gwunhar profile image
Mardoch

Am I the only one who thinks "time spent on site" is a bad metric? I want my users to be done and gone in a flash. If you have to flail about to get work done then I've failed.

Obviously it's different for social sites, but is that even a particularly large slice of websites?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I agree. Hopefully it can be contextualized alongside something qualitative.

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gonzalezanguita profile image
Jose Tomas Gonzalez

I haven't informed about the metric technicalities but.. if you keep a low "time spent on site" metric then it should be helpful or not?

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Dave Jacoby

For my lab, the end product is a huge file of genomic data, for which people spend up to thousands of dollars of grant money, so people come here, do their work and leave.

For a newspaper site, for example, the goal is to get people reading, which exposes them to ads, which pay the bills. Here, "time spent on site" is exactly the metric at play.