Metrics You Should Monitor for Increasing Visitors' Time on Your Website

 

Generally speaking, when you’re able to keep visitors on your website for longer, a conversion is more likely to occur. That’s why monitoring your Google Analytics’ average session duration, average time on page, and bounce rates are crucial for identifying opportunities for improvement that will increase the time visitors spend on your website.

 

Learn more about these important metrics so it’ll be easier for you to gather data and develop an effective strategy for getting visitors to stick around.

‘Average session duration’ is a metric that reports the average amount of time visitors spend on your site. The average session duration is calculated in the following: the total duration of all sessions (in seconds) / number of sessions. A session is simply a visit to your site. A session starts when someone views a page on your site and ends when they leave your site or after 30 minutes of inactivity. Everything that person does during that visit is counted as a single session.

Another metric you should look at is ‘average time on page’ which is the average amount of time all visitors spend on a single page. However, this is only calculated for non-bounces. Depending on the page’s purpose, a low average time on the page can indicate that the visitor isn’t engaging with your content which can be a missed opportunity for a conversion.

‘Bounce rate’ measures the percentage of visitors who clicked away from your site right after they landed on it. A high bounce rate isn’t good because it will lead search engines to consider your content’s quality as questionable and make your rankings in search results suffer.

 

While bounce rate may seem clear cut, it doesn’t paint the whole picture. For example, let’s say a visitor lands on your page and spends a considerable amount of time on it before leaving. Even though the visitor didn’t go to another page on your site, there was still engagement. This is where digital marketers will use an 'adjusted bounce rate.'

An adjusted bounce rate is when a visitor has spent over a certain amount of time on the page. The timeframe can range from 10 seconds to several minutes, it’s up to the marketer and what they deem as appropriate for the site and content.

 

Once the timeframe has been met, the visitor is no longer counted as a “bounce,” even though no additional pages were visited. Therefore, your bounce rate will represent visitors who haven’t spent a required “minimal time” on your site (i.e. true bounces).

It’s essential to remember that visitors come to your site to seek information. If they don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll either bounce or spend little time on the page. That’s why you should monitor these metrics to identify low performing pages and make improvements to the content, design, user experience, etc.

 

If you desire visitors to spend more time on your website, contact Sales & Marketing Technologies today. We offer web design, development, and digital marketing services to help businesses get more sales or leads from their site.

 

Call 407.682.2222 or contact us below to schedule a free 30-minute website consultation!