Calculating Minutes on Site Since Last Event

[oneflash]

Hi community,

I tried to create an audience based on various periods of time between Visit Start and Last Event, calculated in minutes. Since my test visit only ever qualified for the 0-5 minute audience, I'm thinking the dates do not carry minutes and so the difference betwen the dates is always zero.  Anyone ever use a similar calculation?

[mark_reddin · Accepted solution]

@oneflash - dates in AudienceStream definitely do carry minutes.  They are stored internally as Epoch timestamps, although in Trace, only the date part is shown.

1. Visit Start Date is a built in in AS

2. You can add a "Now" date, to be set to the current time on any incoming event

3. Then you need a Number, to be set to the difference between 2 and 1, in minutes.

You should see this number incrementing during a Trace session.

Mark

[oneflash]

Great reply, thank you!

I set up the "Now" date on any event as suggested and now have the minutes on site attribute.

An interesting discovery to those reading this thread. The minutes on site attribute I created based on the Visit Start timestamp minus my "Now" last event timestamp, is calculated on "any event". However, If the visitor enters the site, example like they might on a blog post, they may never register a second event so the calculation of minutes on site never occurs . Clearly scroll tracking might relieve this problem but keep this in mind if you were trying to remarket to people on site > X minutes.