Visit Duration: What It Is and How Companies Can Use It

What is Visit Duration?

   

    Visit Duration is an important metric to discuss because it allows companies to measure how long a customer stayed on their site. According to Lesson 1, visit duration is, “The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the time stamp of the first activity in the session” (Lesson 1, West Virginia University). If the duration is very low per customer, this shows that the website might have some flaws and needs some updating. “According to our research, a reasonable benchmark for average session duration is between 2-3 minutes” (Albright, 2021). If a customer is staying on a site for an abnormally long amount of time, this might mean that the website is hard to navigate. There are many different aspects to this metric, and it is very important that companies understand how to use this metric to their advantage to improve a customer’s experience online. 

Companies can use this metric to understand:

·      To find how likely users are to complete the website goal (page views, purchase, etc.)

·      To analyze traffic month over month

·      To understand fluctuations and trends

(SimilarWeb, 2021)

Examples

More companies are understanding the importance of web metrics and how to measure what is and isn’t working based on the metric results. According to Similar Web, “People spend a significantly longer time on healthcare and hospital sites. The average there lies at 3:38 per session. Next are financial services with 2:18 and pharmaceutical and medical device at 2:16. All other industries show an average lower than two minutes” (Schneider, 2020). Healthcare and hospital sites might have a longer duration per customer because there is a lot of information on those type of sites. Below is a graph that shows the average visit duration based on the industry between August 2019 and July 2020. 

 

The results shown above are significantly higher than the average time a consumer usually spends on a site which is around 2-3 minutes. It is understandable that e-commerce and the travel industry have the highest visit duration between 6-7 minutes. A lot of consumers might spend a longer period browsing on those sites because they are usually endless and have so many options to look through. I know I could spend easily spend 2-3 hours browsing through everything Amazon has to offer!

Average visit duration is a metric that smaller companies can take advantage of more than companies like Amazon or Trip Advisor. Website design and effectiveness is crucial for a small business to capitalize on because website visitors only need half a second to form an opinion of the website they are visiting. (Saita, 2021). Average website duration is one of the most important metrics to understand because it shows how interested customers are in what the website has to offer. Over time, the more companies study their website metrics, the better they will understand the average customer and how to adapt to their needs online. 

References

Albright, D. (2021). Benchmarking Average Session Duration: What it Means and How to 

    Improve It. Databox. https://databox.com/average-session-duration-benchmark

 

Saita, G. (2021). 2021 Small Business Website Statistics You Need to Know. Pixolabo. 

    https://pixolabo.com/2021-small-business-website-statistics/

 

Schneider, D. (2020). Session Duration: How to Measure It and What It Reveals. SimilarWeb. 

    https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/research/market-research/session-duration/

 

SimilarWeb. (2021). Average Visit Duration. https://support.similarweb.com/hc/en-

    us/articles/115000501485-Average-Visit-Duration

 

West Virginia University. (2021). Lesson 1: Introduction to Web Analytics, Basics of Web 

    Analytics and Tool Introduction and Selection. 

    Ecampus.https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?

    course_id=_176477_1&content_id=_8897673_1&framesetWrapped=true