When you visit your favorite website for some reason and spend a great amount of time on it, either going through the pages or just looking to buy some product, do you know that your time is being tracked?
Imagine a customer casually scrolling through your store’s aisles. You can calculate how much time each of the customers spends and find an average time spent in your store. But on the website, it’s different.
The time your visitor spends on each page of your website, whether it’s a news article website or an e-commerce website will determine how much they like the website and what you offer. The time spent by them can be measured, but it’s different compared to real life. When you have a website it is important to know how many people have spent how much time, and you would need to find an average time spent on your website.
But what is the average time spent? This blog will help you find answers to questions and related questions about it and how to improve it.
What Is the Average Time Spent On A Website?
Average time spent on a website is a measuring tool used to measure the time an average user spends on your website. It tells how often people stay on your website. When a user first visits your website, their time on your site begins and it ends when they leave the website.
A report by contentsquare digital benchmark tells that 54 seconds is the average time spent on all industries’ websites. Whereas, in some cases, an average time of a minimum of 44 seconds to 1 minute is spent on e-commerce websites. But blog post users spent an average of 2 to 5 minutes.
This alone does not just determine your website’s overall performance, but other metrics also need to be taken into account. These can be bounce rates, page views, and change rates. This helps us get a complete idea about how users act on websites.
Average Time Spent On Different Industry Pages:
In the year 2021 Digital Experience Benchmark report, Contentsquare looked at information from over 20 billion user sessions around the world.
They successfully tracked how long the people have spent time on a page in 10 different industries. This showed big differences between them.
The major difference was in business-two businesses or B2B industries, where around an average of 1 minute and 20 seconds are spent. So, if your website is in the B2B industry, the findings from the report tell you that an average of 1 minute and 20 seconds of time should be spent on your website by a user.
Whereas the lowest time spent on industries was in the grocery and energy industries, where an average of less than 50 seconds was spent by their average user respectfully.
While other industries had an average of around 59 seconds spent by their average users.
Two types of audiences browse online. One who wants to buy something like fashionable clothes would spend less time on an e-commerce site. On the other hand, the second kind of audience is those who want to read blogs and gain information by reading something on your site. So keep this in mind when you’re designing your website.
Why Average Time Spent Matters:
Having a high average time spent often indicates that your page is performing well. The user found your website highly friendly and engaging, and the content is valuable.
However, it is important to note that there is no general way of knowing that a high average time spent does not always indicate your website is performing “well”.
For example, If you are managing an e-commerce, you would want your users to spend more time on your e-commerce website. You want them to take a look at all your categories, find their favorite products, place orders, and come back again if they liked your service.
Similarly, if you run a blog site, you would want your users to spend more time as well. This would mean that they like your content because it is engaging, informative, and user-friendly, which could result in them becoming a part of your blog membership.
How To Calculate Average Time Spent On A website:
The average time spent is calculated by dividing the total time spent on your website by all users during the specific time by the total number of users who visited during the same time.
You should use online website analysis tools like Google Analytics to calculate the average time spent on a website. Google Analytics is free and the most popular website analytic tool and it gives accurate data. These tools track user’s behavior on your website.
Difference Between Average Time Spend And Session Duration:
The average time spent is the number that measures how long people spend on a single page before moving to another or exiting your website. But, it doesn’t count the time spent on your website’s last page the user visited or how much total time was spent on all parts of your website.
Whereas, the session duration measures the average time spent by the user during one session. Session means breaking down the time your user spends on each single page, creating a session of it, like being inactive, and so on. This also includes the time spent on the last page before leaving.
Factors on a Website That Impact Page Visits:
Before improving the time spent by your average user, it is important to first find a cause. There are many reasons for the average time spent to be less, and the following are the common causes that can help you find the problem.
- It might be difficult for your users to navigate through your website, especially if it’s not a mobile-friendly site.
- The site could be taking a long time to load up pages, and this can be due to many reasons; most of the time it can be due to the content on your site being heavy. This means high quality and high storage, which could become heavy for your website pages to load—resulting in a slow-loading page.
- Most of the time, time the users don’t find the content they want, and your content might be in those cases. So your user would often exit your site.
- Suppose your website contains advertisements or very frequent pop-ups. Too many pop-ups can annoy the person visiting your website and they will eventually leave.
- Often time the layout of your website can play a role as well. This includes your website themes, font size type of style, design, and so on like red text with a blend of purple or dark colors, which would not be very readable.
- The call to action button is sometimes mixed with the design or is located apart from the main content for example if your e-commerce website has a picture of the product and then a text description and review and at the end a CTA button. Which would create an unprofessional and bad impression to the visitor.
- Getting user trust is important. The digital world is filled with scam websites. This has made many people skeptical about online sites that are not so famous or known to the public especially if you are running an e-commerce store that requires them to put their personal information.
Ways To Improve Average Time Spend:
There are many ways to improve the average time spent by the users. But it requires you to plan carefully and try to execute it accurately. The following are the ways.
Create A Persona Profile:
Create a persona profile of your target audience. This means trying to understand your target audience’s behavior, hobbies, and mindset when they approach your competitor’s website.
This is done by doing a thorough research. Research that includes reviewing and taking feedback about your website from your users.
Joining the groups of your target audience on social media platforms. Going into your competitor’s social media page and studying their audience behavior towards your competitor’s posts and content.
Ask yourself these three questions.
- What type of posts does your target audience like or the products that have performed well?
- What type of information do they come for when they search on search engines?
- Which content on your website has had a good engagement and a user-friendly review?
These questions will make you understand your audience and give an accurate target to focus on.
Increase The Loading Speed Of Your Site:
Imagine you are on a site and you want to read information about a product you want or are interested in, but the site is taking time to load up. So you would leave that site and go to another website.
Having a quick loading speed page is an important thing to do. Many studies suggest that the average loading speed of a website should be under 3.22 seconds, no matter what industry you’re working in.
This helps in reducing the bounce rate and increasing the average time spent. Getting your page to load faster depends on many things. But optimizing your image and content size by using online tools, reducing file sizes, and using light themes, results in your website pages loading quickly.
Have High-Quality Content:
Why having high-quality content is important? Let’s take an example of you wanting to buy a Christmas gift for children but not knowing what type of gift. So you would go online to search for the best gifts to give to children on Christmas 2023 or search in the e-commerce store.
The first kind of search will lead you to many blogs and articles that will try to answer your question. But you who want accurate information would go to a site that will give you an expected answer. Plus if there are reviews and videos in those blogs that will grab more interest and answer doubts about the toy. Whereas, when searching on an e-commerce website. Your eyes will glaze upon the toy that has many reviews and sales. Like the PlayStation 5 console which is the most famous choice of toy for Christmas.
What keeps someone engaging over and over again? Content is worth reading and being delighted. Informative and engaging content makes the visitor want to stay. A website is defined mainly by its content.
To create high-quality content you would need to understand your target audience’s mindset and think from that perspective. An image that can be appealing, a video that can help give informative reviews about your website product or service, and so on.
Don’t just create content. Create a kind of content that is delightful, engaging, and informative. Use humor and trending topics to make it appealing.
Creating VIP Content On Your Website:
You can use the VIP content goal. This means Visual, Interactive, and Personalized content. These are described in detail.
- Visual: This means creating content that includes pictures, infographics, videos, and graphs, which can be appealing and engaging to visuals and make things easier for the reader or visitor to understand your website content.
- Interactive: This means you would create content that has a comment section and a survey, like a topic that you have on your website that is related to depression. You can have a survey from your readers “Give your thoughts related to this topic …” When a reader can interact with your content they often become active users over time.
- Personalization: Personalization of your content is important. If your content can be related to the reader or user can make them want to continue exploring your website. You can create categories for the type of content they like and would keep them engaged on your website.
Making Your Site User-Friendly:
Create a site that gives a professional website feeling and look, a site with a design that attracts people. Your website should have friendly navigation so people stay longer.
To create a user-friendly site, you would require an interface on your website that is fast and adaptable to different platforms like laptops, mobile phones, and so on. This is done by making sure that the website you are building is tested on these different types of platforms. If there are issues, then resolving them should be important.
Use themes on your website that are accessible on all platforms and are user-friendly. Creating a navigation system like improving readability on your posts. This is done by having easy-to-read fonts. Furthermore, breaking down the headings and subheadings of your content at the beginning of your website page so that the reader can directly go to the content they want to read.
Have a simple drop-down menu for your visitors so that they don’t have to get confused about things and exit the website. Put the most important topic or menus at the beginning or the top. Use navigation text that matches your business and is SEO-optimized.
Have a search box on your website that is easily accessible and easy to use, with a simple design that doesn’t blend in with the background or cause confusion.
Give the visitor the option to them, giving reviews about your content and site. It will create engagement between you and your users, and their time spent will increase the feedback and be beneficial for your website overall.
User-friendly experiences can make the visitor want to come back and read more with the latest content updates. A blog site can tell things about like “New Technology To Be Revealed In 2024”.
Internal Linking:
Another way of creating content that is engaging is internal linking. Internal linking can result in easy navigation for the user and improve the average time spent by the user on your website. Your content can have internal linking in the middle of the sentence to your site about a similar topic that was highlighted.
For example, when talking about the best AI writing tools of 2024, you can mention your website in the list and hyperlink it so the reader will click and reach your website if they like the features.
Exiting Pop-up:
Using a pop-up at the end when the user is leaving is better than using a pop-up at the start of your website. Exit intended pop-up appears when the visitor is deciding to leave your website. It can be like “ Before You Go.. You Can Sign Up so that you don’t miss out on special offers, get newsletters, and much more”.
This will not change their decision, but it can be beneficial for the future.
Conclusion:
Average time spent is an important measuring tool when you run a website. It tells you about how the visitor interacts with your website for how long. It gives data about the overall visitors and the time could help you find out the cause for the average time spent.
The average time spent has a formula and many website analysis tools like Google Analytics. Which can help you give accurate average time spent data. There are many ways to improve the average time spent on a website. From improving the loading speed of your website to creating high-quality and VIP content for your site.
