What is Your Visit Duration Really Telling You?

Visit Duration, also known as Session Duration, can be one of the most interesting and challenging visitor metrics to analyze. This is due to the fact that the relevance of session duration is so closely tied to the business objective and varies so widely across industries and segments. For example, an online survey in 2017 of 181 companies revealed that visitors to business-to-consumer (B2C) companies spend on average 42.3% more time on site than visitors to business-to-business (B2B) companies (Schneider, 2020). As seen in Figure 1, B2C categories such as eCommerce and travel command longer share of visitor attention than the B2B category. This is intuitive because B2B visitors typically expect vendors to “get to the point” and demand clear Information Architectures with crisp CTAs so they can quickly determine if the site they are visiting is appropriate for their immediate needs. By contrast, B2C visitors may linger and shop, compare pricing, read reviews and recommendations before making a purchase. 

Figure 1.

 

Continuing this premise, it can be stated that average session duration should be expected to decrease as customers proceed farther along their customer journey. Specifically, during the brand awareness phase, when a visitor is first being introduced to a brand, they may linger longer on pages, or visit multiple pages trying to learn more about a company, service or product. However, as they enter the consideration and education phases of their customer journey, and their level of intent increases, they will desire to move more quickly through a site to achieve their intended goal. Thus, average session duration must not be “taken as a whole” with one aggregate value pertinent to every visit to the site, but rather leveraged to analyze whether customer journey-specific content is effectively moving visitors to our intended outcome. In other words, is the session duration of our thought leadership content flow measurably longerthan the average session duration of our digital marketing landing page to download conversion flow? Stated another way, if the average session duration of our thought leadership path is too short then that is indicative of poor content suffering from poor engagement. By contrast, if our digital marketing to conversion flow average session duration is too long, then visitors may be struggling to quickly understand the value of our gated asset indicating poor landing page design. 

One of the greatest challenges with calculating the appropriate session duration as relevant to the customer journey has to do with how Google Analytics (and other platforms) calculate the metric. Google Analytics tracks page activities using timestamps every time a page loads or when an activity triggers more events. This is measured by looking at the difference between when the first event occurred compared to the next. The problem with using timestamps to track activity is that it cannot track the time spent on the exit page. The exit page is the last page the visitor sees before they exit the website completely (Osman, 2019). For example, if a visitor arrives at a landing page, but does not fill out the inquiry form thus triggering an event or a thank you page load, we have no way of knowing how much time the visitor may have struggled on that page before bouncing. 

If increasing the length of session duration is defined as a business objective (as there must be specific reasons to do so such as increases session duration directly correlates to increased conversions) then there are several tactics available to achieve this end (Albright, 2019).

• Include Videos - By leveraging video, you can present information more dynamically, allowing for more convenient multitasking.
•  Break Up Text with Engaging Images - content with custom graphics that help visualize statistics performs better in terms of session duration.
• Understand the Customer Journey - think about where new content fits in the typical user journey—is it top-of-the-funnel content, or is it designed to convert returning visitors
• Track the Right Metrics - which pages have the lowest average time-on-page to identify which pages need the most work
•  Make Sure Your Interface Is User-Friendly - a distraction-free experience focuses a reader’s attention on the article or web page instead of on closing pop-ups, ignoring ads, or exploring a sidebar
•  Format Your Content so it’s Easy to Read - if it looks like it’s easy to scan through (descriptive subheads) visitors will spend a few seconds scrolling down
• Link to Other Pages of Your Site - If people are interested in a topic, they will keep reading
• Build a Library – build a hub-and-spoke model that identifies a relevant, high-level topic then builds out articles on all related topics
• Publish Content That’s Worth Reading - provide on-point, exhaustive, accurate information that is easy to read and understand

As with all Web analytics metrics, there is no “one size fits all” session duration value. “Good” values will vary by industry, customer segment and even throughout the site itself.  

References

Schneider, Daniel. (27 August 2020). Session Duration: How to Measure It and What It Reveals. SimilarWeb. Retrieved from: https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/session-duration/

Osman, Maddy. (3 February 2019). Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved from: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/content-marketing-kpis/user-engagement-metrics/#close

Albright, Dann. (23 July 2019). Benchmarking Average Session Duration: What it Means and How to Improve It. Databox. Retrieved from: https://databox.com/average-session-duration-benchmark