Honest question here: Why do all this? If there are no secondary source of data that one can observe (subscriptions, adclicks, citations, google link scores...), then why spend so much time and energy on statistics?
I'm not the OP, but I have my own personal blog and a lot of side projects I make $0 money on (I don't use ads).
I use Analytics (Google Analytics, Woopra, GoSquared, and ChartBeat (although never at the same time, that would be ridiculous)) for two main reasons.
1) I enjoy looking at analytical data. Something about charts and graphs just intrigues me. Don't even get me started on the netflow statistics I monitor at my job.
2) It's fun to see how many people are viewing my posts. When I get a post that makes it to the front page of HN or Reddit and I get to see the hundreds of thousands of hits my page gets, it gets me excited to keep posting.
Assuming you have a reasonable estimate on the time spent reading an article, the distribution of time spent on the page can be telling as to the quality of the article and how you conveyed the content.
If a reader leaves early that's possibly a symptom of poor writing. If you're lucky, it was just the wrong topic for the reader: no shame in that. If you're unlucky, however, it may be that your content is confronting.
If you have good content but it's not presented properly, you're not going to get value across to the reader. They'll decide to skim read, skip paragraphs, or just leave the page altogether.
In a perfect world, the readers would comment about what was problematic about the article. In the real world, they don't. They don't comment as they don't feel confident to speak about the topic. They don't comment as they don't feel it's worth their time. They don't comment as they don't want to sound stupid.
If average time spent reading a page (culling the outliers) is about the same as what you'd expect to read the article, it's a good signal that you have the right content and the right method of presentation.
Authors can use this to help bring content to readers in a clearer and more engaging fashion -- a win-win for all involved.
I do a lot of content based marketing in different market/industries. The type of testing you describe is best used in addition to click-through rates. Due to how presentation and content can be both right, and still get you bad results. How come? The offer stinks. If the offer stinks, then the click-through rates will show. And that's the most important metric of this group that you should pay attention to: how interesting is my offer to the market.
Agreed but that's only applicable when you have a product.
I should have specified that I was coming at this from the point of view that someone's writing a single page article or blog post with no conversion target other than to have it read.
If you're actually aiming to achieve anything concrete with a web page, then the only way to improve that is exactly as you said: directly track conversion to your goal.
I do think one should always have an offer of sone kind. Even if its an email subscription to a blog. That way you can develop a redership for possible future offerrings. Specially useful if you see startup in the near future.
This is measuring something different though. I could have a bad article that heavily pushes an offer and a very good article that doesn't.
The time on page can give you a relative statistic to compare your articles and develop a more engaged readership over the long term, not just optimize to try and sell them something right now.
An example would be something like patio11's posts, some of them are pushing for a conversion but I don't think that each would be best measured in terms of a conversion made right now.
There are three factors you have to keep in mind when writing content: Message (the content), Media (how you distribute it (a blog)), Market (who reads it). The better way of adjusting for those three (optimizing) is to measure conversions on the Message. Otherwise, you are tracking fluff. Of course, my opinion based on experience.
