Visit Duration

We always focus on the quantity of people coming to our site, but never about the quality of their visits. A user that spends 20 minutes looking over goods and services is worth far more than one that arrives and hits the back button. The length of time someone spends at your site is a good indication of how engaged they are. The question is,

How can you tell how long people stay at the site?

Most stat packages include a section called Visit Duration. Visit duration tells us how long people stay at the site. On our site for example, Visit Duration tells us that 71 percent of our visitors are gone within 30 seconds. In other words, almost three quarters of the people hit the back button without reading a thing.

That's the bad news. The good news is the rest are on the site for 15 minutes or more. One out of 15 are on the site for over an hour. Our average visit duration is 8 minutes.

Average Visit Duration tells us how engaged viewers are. Many times we incorrectly evaluate site performance based solely on leads (or sales). When leads don't come we assume the site is failing. Success on the Internet is like chopping down a tree. You lay 6 good blows into the tree and nothing happens. Not until the seventh blow does the tree fall. Visit duration gives us an idea of how far we are into the tree. High visit duration means you are one blow away from falling the tree (getting a lot of leads).

A site needs traffic, no question about that. But what good is traffic if no one stays on the site? Paying attention to your Visit Duration insures people will be interested in your site once they arrive. Visit Duration is a critical marketing statistic because is measures how effective the site is - whether or not you're hooking people in. Increase visit duration (by making the site more interesting) and you'll increase sales. It's that simple.