In today’s competitive world, there are tons of companies fighting to grab users’ attention. So it’s difficult to keep users engaged for even a couple of seconds on your website. And when you can’t keep your users engaged it causes low average session duration, increases your bounce rates, and kill your conversions. Now how to increase the website’s average time on page defeating all those obstacles?
No worries! There are multiple strategies you can use to increase your website’s session duration.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through a detailed discussion on “average time on page”, which going to help you to know precisely where your focus needs to be.
Let’s jump on to the discussion.
What is a good average time on page and why it’s important?
The average time on page is exactly as the name suggests. It is the average amount of time that website visitors spend on a single page. Average time on page is the difference between the point when a user enters the page for the first time and the moment when they leave. Basically, it lets you know how much time these visitors actually spent on that webpage before clicking a link to proceed to another webpage. That proceeds to another webpage can be going to a different website after viewing that web page and others on the same website.
The average time on page tells you how well visitors are engaging with your content. That means it actually gives you valuable insight into how your content is performing and where you need to work. It also indicates which pages your users spend time interacting with, and which pages aren’t performing well. Moreover, it’s an indicator to search engines your website content is loved by people. That can ultimately help you to rank higher.
Bounce Rate vs. Average Time on Page:
Bounce Rate is the percentage of users who arrive on a page and click directly back to the search results after viewing a page. It gives you insights into how different users are interacting with your site. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site after only viewing one page.
Simply, Bounce Rate = Single-page Sessions / Total Sessions
For example, if 100 users land on your website (total sessions) and 5 of them exit without triggering another request (single-page sessions), your website’s bounce rate is 5%.
On the other hand, Average Time on Page measures the average amount of time users spend on a specific page. This metric is a great way to identify problems with a specific page.
Average Time on Page = (Time Spent on Page) / ( Page Views – Page Exits )
For example, A page with 1,000 page views, 300 page exits, and 200 minutes of time spent on a page has an Average Time Spent on Page of 200/(1,000 – 300) = 200/700 = .28 minutes or 16 seconds.
That means, the bounce rate informs you that a certain percentage of visitors quit your webpage without taking action. While average time on page informs the time a visitor actually spent on a specific page before clicking a link to proceed to another page.
The bounce rate is not the same thing as the amount of time a visitor spends on your site. A user can spend hours on a page of your website which counts as a good average time on page, but when they click back to the search results, it’s counted as a bounce. You can find out the both average time on page and bounce rate in the Google Analytics account of your website or with any other average time on page analytics tool.
How to Increase Average Time on Page?
So, how do you improve the average time on page? Below you’ll discover a few tweaks and methods to increase the average time on page.
Publish Quality Content:
Content is the king of any website. It is the thing for which the user came to your website in the first place so make sure your website content is great. There is no technic or tricks that can help you if you’re publishing bad content. If your pages are challenging to read or don’t deliver what you promised, no one will want to stay on your site. The first thing you can do about your content is make sure they are easy to read. To make your content easily scan able incorporate subheadings, bullet lists, short paragraphs, media, and plenty of white space. To make your content easy to read, remove any instances of passive voice, shorten long sentences, and add transition words. Use fonts that are large enough for people to read, particularly on mobile devices. Your chosen font should be easy to read.
Always create content that solves your visitor’s pain points so that they don’t have to go to another website to find what you’re looking for. Get to the point quickly to catch visitors’ attention. Give a detailed intro on what they’re going to get into the content. Focus on helping your readers, rather than selling your products or services. Keep refreshing your old content with new information regularly. Use tools such as Google Alerts to get alerts of new updates around the topic and update your page content accordingly.
Optimize your Website’s Design:
People take less than 3-4 seconds to decide whether they’ll stay or leave after they reach your site. And when they see your website is badly designed, they leave within a second. Which ultimately impacts the average time on page. So the first interaction with your website is the most important. For that, you should aim for a clean, user-friendly design.
When you make your website’s design complex, it becomes difficult to navigate. A clean user interface includes the ease of accessing certain sections, a clear navigation bar, and one that gives the visitor the opportunity to browse without distractions. You need to avoid using too many colors, different font types, different font sizing, intrusive advertising pop-ups, and other features that could make the visiting experience not ideal. Also, you should make sure your home screen and product pages (if you have them) have enough white space, and your website visitors have an opportunity to browse without any distractors.
Add Videos Whenever Needed:
Videos are one of the most effective, highly interactive and one of best methods for spreading information. It’s not only engaging but also an enjoyable way to keep your visitors stay on your page. As watching a clip is often easier than reading through a long body of text, adding videos to your pages increase the time users spend on your website. You can add your own video content or you can also embed videos made by others as long as the videos are relevant to your page. Adding relevant tutorials, tips, and how-to videos can increase user engagement.
Optimize for Mobile Devices:
The majority of browsing sessions now take place on mobile devices. If your mobile site is hard to use or slow, you may miss a lot of engagement. So having a mobile-friendly website design for your web page is a must. Though it’s crucial to make your mobile experience just as smooth as your desktop one is, you have to ensure your website is working perfectly on mobile. However, not only mobile phones, your website should display perfectly on every type of screen size.
Improve Your Website Performance:
A study released by Google stated that 53% will leave a webpage if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Even if you have a user-friendly design and updated content, nobody will be left around to see it when it takes so much time. So it makes sense that loading time has a huge impact on your website bounce rate. On the other hand, decreasing load time can increase your average time on page.
If you have a ton of large, high-resolution images, pages may take too long to load. To fix it optimizing images, reducing redirects, minifying your HTML and CSS, reducing server response time, setting up browser caching, etc are just a few ways. To get an overview of potential areas to improve you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and work on those areas.
Conclusion:
That’s all for now! Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of the average time on page and how to increase it. Using the information in this guide, you will be able to create a better experience for users and increase the amount of time they spend on your site.
So what are you waiting for? Focus on optimizing your site to have visitors browse for longer.
Have you tried any other strategies that helped you increase the average time on page? Please share your experience in the comments section below!
For more, informative articles, check our Blog page. Also, follow our Facebook page and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more updates.
In today’s competitive world, there are tons of companies fighting to grab users’ attention. So it’s difficult to keep users engaged for even a couple of seconds on your website. And when you can’t keep your users engaged it causes low average session duration, increases your bounce rates, and kill your conversions. Now how to increase the website’s average time on page defeating all those obstacles?
No worries! There are multiple strategies you can use to increase your website’s session duration.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through a detailed discussion on “average time on page”, which going to help you to know precisely where your focus needs to be.
Let’s jump on to the discussion.
What is a good average time on page and why it’s important?
The average time on page is exactly as the name suggests. It is the average amount of time that website visitors spend on a single page. Average time on page is the difference between the point when a user enters the page for the first time and the moment when they leave. Basically, it lets you know how much time these visitors actually spent on that webpage before clicking a link to proceed to another webpage. That proceeds to another webpage can be going to a different website after viewing that web page and others on the same website.
The average time on page tells you how well visitors are engaging with your content. That means it actually gives you valuable insight into how your content is performing and where you need to work. It also indicates which pages your users spend time interacting with, and which pages aren’t performing well. Moreover, it’s an indicator to search engines your website content is loved by people. That can ultimately help you to rank higher.
Bounce Rate vs. Average Time on Page:
Bounce Rate is the percentage of users who arrive on a page and click directly back to the search results after viewing a page. It gives you insights into how different users are interacting with your site. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site after only viewing one page.
Simply, Bounce Rate = Single-page Sessions / Total Sessions
For example, if 100 users land on your website (total sessions) and 5 of them exit without triggering another request (single-page sessions), your website’s bounce rate is 5%.
On the other hand, Average Time on Page measures the average amount of time users spend on a specific page. This metric is a great way to identify problems with a specific page.
Average Time on Page = (Time Spent on Page) / ( Page Views – Page Exits )
For example, A page with 1,000 page views, 300 page exits, and 200 minutes of time spent on a page has an Average Time Spent on Page of 200/(1,000 – 300) = 200/700 = .28 minutes or 16 seconds.
That means, the bounce rate informs you that a certain percentage of visitors quit your webpage without taking action. While average time on page informs the time a visitor actually spent on a specific page before clicking a link to proceed to another page.
The bounce rate is not the same thing as the amount of time a visitor spends on your site. A user can spend hours on a page of your website which counts as a good average time on page, but when they click back to the search results, it’s counted as a bounce. You can find out the both average time on page and bounce rate in the Google Analytics account of your website or with any other average time on page analytics tool.
How to Increase Average Time on Page?
So, how do you improve the average time on page? Below you’ll discover a few tweaks and methods to increase the average time on page.
Publish Quality Content:
Content is the king of any website. It is the thing for which the user came to your website in the first place so make sure your website content is great. There is no technic or tricks that can help you if you’re publishing bad content. If your pages are challenging to read or don’t deliver what you promised, no one will want to stay on your site. The first thing you can do about your content is make sure they are easy to read. To make your content easily scan able incorporate subheadings, bullet lists, short paragraphs, media, and plenty of white space. To make your content easy to read, remove any instances of passive voice, shorten long sentences, and add transition words. Use fonts that are large enough for people to read, particularly on mobile devices. Your chosen font should be easy to read.
Always create content that solves your visitor’s pain points so that they don’t have to go to another website to find what you’re looking for. Get to the point quickly to catch visitors’ attention. Give a detailed intro on what they’re going to get into the content. Focus on helping your readers, rather than selling your products or services. Keep refreshing your old content with new information regularly. Use tools such as Google Alerts to get alerts of new updates around the topic and update your page content accordingly.
Optimize your Website’s Design:
People take less than 3-4 seconds to decide whether they’ll stay or leave after they reach your site. And when they see your website is badly designed, they leave within a second. Which ultimately impacts the average time on page. So the first interaction with your website is the most important. For that, you should aim for a clean, user-friendly design.
When you make your website’s design complex, it becomes difficult to navigate. A clean user interface includes the ease of accessing certain sections, a clear navigation bar, and one that gives the visitor the opportunity to browse without distractions. You need to avoid using too many colors, different font types, different font sizing, intrusive advertising pop-ups, and other features that could make the visiting experience not ideal. Also, you should make sure your home screen and product pages (if you have them) have enough white space, and your website visitors have an opportunity to browse without any distractors.
Add Videos Whenever Needed:
Videos are one of the most effective, highly interactive and one of best methods for spreading information. It’s not only engaging but also an enjoyable way to keep your visitors stay on your page. As watching a clip is often easier than reading through a long body of text, adding videos to your pages increase the time users spend on your website. You can add your own video content or you can also embed videos made by others as long as the videos are relevant to your page. Adding relevant tutorials, tips, and how-to videos can increase user engagement.
Optimize for Mobile Devices:
The majority of browsing sessions now take place on mobile devices. If your mobile site is hard to use or slow, you may miss a lot of engagement. So having a mobile-friendly website design for your web page is a must. Though it’s crucial to make your mobile experience just as smooth as your desktop one is, you have to ensure your website is working perfectly on mobile. However, not only mobile phones, your website should display perfectly on every type of screen size.
Improve Your Website Performance:
A study released by Google stated that 53% will leave a webpage if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Even if you have a user-friendly design and updated content, nobody will be left around to see it when it takes so much time. So it makes sense that loading time has a huge impact on your website bounce rate. On the other hand, decreasing load time can increase your average time on page.
If you have a ton of large, high-resolution images, pages may take too long to load. To fix it optimizing images, reducing redirects, minifying your HTML and CSS, reducing server response time, setting up browser caching, etc are just a few ways. To get an overview of potential areas to improve you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and work on those areas.
Conclusion:
That’s all for now! Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of the average time on page and how to increase it. Using the information in this guide, you will be able to create a better experience for users and increase the amount of time they spend on your site.
So what are you waiting for? Focus on optimizing your site to have visitors browse for longer.
Have you tried any other strategies that helped you increase the average time on page? Please share your experience in the comments section below!
For more, informative articles, check our Blog page. Also, follow our Facebook page and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more updates.
Kazi Asif Mahmud
Marketing Manager, W3 Eden Inc.