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This Is the Only GA Metric I Care About

And it’s not page views…

5 min readApr 29, 2020

Ok, I do care about pageviews a bit, but they’re kind of a vanity metric, especially if you’re looking to sell your own products

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

If you’re looking to monetise exclusively through ads, then you’re gonna be wanting a lot of page views, but even then, it’s not as important as the average time your viewers spend reading your articles. More time on page= more people looking at ads.

You could have 100,000 hits a month and still only be able to make a few quid from ad revenue. Pinterest traffic is NOTORIOUS for tanking your average time on page, purely because a lot of bloggers click through to add you to their scheduling tool — they were never going read your article.

Why average time on page is the only metric I track

Not to be confused with average session duration, because that’s often a really sad number that I like to ignore. I also don’t really understand the whole sessions thing if I’m totally honest. As long as my sessions are a bit lower than my pageviews, I’m happy.

A high average time of page means that people are actually reading what you’re writing. The information you’re providing is of value. All the time you’re spending punching the keyboard isn’t in vain. Yay!

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Caroline Cocker
Caroline Cocker

Written by Caroline Cocker

Writer, blogger. Rabbit parent to one. Plant parent to many. Occasional runner, jigsaw puzzle enthusiast.

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