Website owners and marketers spend a great deal of time and money leading traffic to a website. But what then? A successful website must engage website visitors and ideally convert those visitors into customers. While website leads are the obvious go-to to gauge whether your website is nailing this goal, it isn’t the only way.

The customer journey is complex and therefore the way you approach the ‘stickiness’ of your website should reflect this. Tracking metrics like Average Session Duration can help to deliver the insights you need to accurately measure your site’s performance.

What is the Average Session Duration metric?
The Average Session Duration metric tracks the general time a visitor spends on your website. In simple terms, this metric tracks the average time from when a visitor enters the site until the visitor leaves. Naturally, the calculation process isn’t straight-forward with multiple factors playing a role, but we won’t go into that detail in this article.

According to Databox’s benchmark data a normal Average Session Duration is around 77.61 seconds for B2B websites. Average time spent on other types of websites (like eCommerce, news, etc.) are between 120 – 180 seconds.

Why should businesses try to improve this metric?
Perhaps you are happy with the amount of leads you are getting from your website and not too fussed about all the technical stuff. Be that as it may, it is important to improve engagement on your website because it will directly affect your ranking in Search Engines. The more relevant and engaging your content is to visitors, the higher your Average Session Duration will be. This to Google and other SERPs is a good indication that your site is worth referring.

How to get website visitors to stay engaged longer?
The quickest way to improve this metric is to locate the page/s on your website that visitors spend the least amount of time on. Dissect the content on this page and improve it by rewriting it and improving the relevance and length of the copy, as well as including ‘sticky’ content like a video, calculator, quiz, infographic, or form.

There are also various other things you can try to improve engagement. Click here for tips.

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Chantel Venter

Chantél Venter is a creative writer, strategic thinker, and a serious gesticulator. She’s passionate about storytelling, small businesses and bringing color to the world ­– be it through her words or wardrobe.

She holds a four-year degree in Business and Mass Media Communication and Journalism. She’s been a copywriter and editor for the technology, insurance and architecture industries since 2007 and believes anybody can run a small business successfully. She therefore enjoys finding and sharing the best and most practical tips for this purpose.