Visit Duration: Why Does this Metric Matter?

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 What is Visit Duration?

Visit duration or average session duration is one of the top metrics measured by marketers. This metric tells a business how engaged their visitors are by measuring the amount of time a visitor spends on a website. Google Analytics defines a session as a visit to a website, the session starts when a user visits the site and continues until they exit or when the session has become inactive after 30 minutes. It is important to note that the average session time is different than average time on a page in that it measures the entire session, not just the time spent on one specific page (Albright, 2021). In the Google Analytics platform this measurement can be found by going to Audience and then to Overview. Figure 1 below illustrates a screen shot image of a website’s Avg. Session Duration from Google Analytics.

Figure 1: Avg. Session Duration (Albright, n.d.)

What Story Does Visit Duration Tell a Business?

Getting visitors to a website is just the beginning of their journey. Once a customer or new lead visits a website, it is important that they remain engaged. The content on the website should be interesting to the visitor and provide them with the value, entertainment or education that they were looking for. Average session time is a measurement of site engagement, telling a website owner how long a user remains engaged with the content of the website (Spinutech, 2020). According to research, an average session time of 2-3 minutes is typically a good benchmark for most websites. Figure 2 illustrates the benchmark average overall (Albright, n.d.)

Figure 2: Average Session Time Overall (Albright, n.d.)

The benchmark will be dependent on the purpose of the website or goals of the business. For example, a local restaurant may want visitors to quickly make a reservation and not spend too much time exploring the website. A B2B business that publishes a lot of education content such as whitepapers or technical documents may desire a higher average session time. A marketer should take a look at average session times for their specific industry as a benchmark for their goals. Figure 3 below illustrates how different industry visit duration times can vary (Schneider, 2021).

Figure 3: Average Visit Duration by Industry (Schneider, 2021)

Expert Tips on Ways to Increase Average Session Time

There are some things a marketer can do on their website that could potentially increase average session time, if that is the intended goal. Below are some key tips for extending session time collected from experts in the digital marketing field.

1.      Use graphic elements and photos to make webpages more visually appealing. Images can also be used as a way to break up long content. This may help keep the reader engaged longer (Albright, n.d.).

2.      Include video content when appropriate. Videos are growing in popularity and this could help increase session duration. For example, according to Jimmy Chan at Pixelicious, the average session duration time of 30-60 seconds jumped to over three minutes after adding video (Albright, n.d.).

3.      Make sure to understand the audience and what they are looking for, and ensure the web content is meaningful and useful to your website visitors (Schneider, 2021).

4.      Optimize website UX design: Ensure the website navigation is simple and clear (Schneider, 2021).

5.      Provide links to related content and make sure popular content is highlighted to keep readers interested (Schneider, 2021).


References

Albright, D. (2021, July 30). Average session duration: Benchmarks, definitions, & pro tips. Databox. https://databox.com/average-session-duration-benchmark.

Schneider, D. (2021, July 28). Session duration - what is it and how to increase it. Similarweb. https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/research/market-research/session-duration/.

Spinutech. (2020, January 29). 7 website Analytics metrics that matter most - Spinutech Blog. 7 Website Analytics Metrics That Matter Most - Spinutech Blog. https://www.spinutech.com/digital-marketing/analytics/analysis/7-website-analytics-that-matter-most/. 






Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 30, 2021 at 6:15 PM

    Hi Erica! I enjoyed reading your blog post. The structure of the post made it easy to read and understand more on the visit duration KPI. Pointing out that average time on page and average session time are two different metrics will prove to be helpful to remember in the future. I agree that providing value, entertainment, and or educational content to the visitor will help to engage and thus increase the visit duration. An aside, I would love to know what websites come in with visit durations over 10 minutes! Looking foward to reading more of your posts.

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