Measuring my DTS?

I recently saw you speak at a seminar and you made a comment about measuring DTS. What is it? I asked around and nobody here seems to know. We use Omniture.

Good question.   It seems that very few people measure DTS and it is, by far, one of the most helpful metrics you’ll find.

DTS is the number of Days To Sale.  If you want to calculate yours, just determine when a user first came into your site and then figure out how many days it took for him to make his purchase.  The time between his initial visit and his PV (purchasing visit) is your number of days to sale.
Of course, you can’t just look at one individual to get your average so now that you know how it works, figure it out for 1,000 (or 1,000,000, depending on how big your company is) users.

How is this metric helpful?   Companies who know what their DTS is often have a higher conversion rate because they plan their thrust and trigger e-mail campaigns around decreasing it (in other words, making it shorter.)