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What is Time Per Visit? A Very Powerful but, Underutilized Engagement Metric!

Did you know that?

• Approx. 68-75% of the visitors don’t spend over 5 minutes on the website.

• Approx. 75-80% of the visitors don’t view more than 5 pages per visit.

• 5-10 mins slot is a sweet-spot for majority of the online businesses, and contribute significantly to the top-line. So; if more and more businesses can stick the visitors on their website for atleast 5-10 minutes, it can impact their top-line numbers by 10-15%.

Over the last 2 years, I have been traveling quite extensively across Asia Pacific to conduct Web Analytics and Digital Marketing workshops for the Banks, Insurance Giants, Telecom, Retailers, Media and Agencies, and it’s quite disheartening to see that majority of these online businesses pay less attention on the engagement metrics, and emphasize too much on the macro transactional metrics. Among the list of various engagement metrics available in the online space, one of the metric that I often talk about during my training sessions is the “Time Spent per Visit”.

Most of the ecommerce managers and digital marketers I met in last 2 years in the APAC region, realize the importance of this metric however; they don’t understand, how to use this metric in an effective way and find opportunities for improvement on the website by understanding the visitor behavior. Let me explain this by sharing some interesting facts:

• Approx. 65-70% of the Keyword Searches are performed by those visitors who spend less than 5 minutes on the website and a lion share of them come from those who spend less than 60 seconds on the website. Majority of these are Category or Product Type specific.

• Approx. 20-25% of the Keyword Searches done by above visitors are Failed Searches.

• Approx. 14-18% of the conversions on the website are contributed by those visitors, who spend less than 5 minutes on the website.

• Approx. 35-40% of the Email Sign-ups for Newsletters came from those visitors who spend less than 5 minutes on the website.

• A significant % of visitors who spend less than 5 minutes on the website, often exit from the Product Page followed by Shopping Cart.

As you can see from the above facts that, unless and until you segment your visitors behavioral data based on “Avg. Time Spent per Visit” metric, you are not going to find any opportunities for improvement on the website for those visitors, who come with a defined objective and usually have a shorter engagement time-span so; it’s very important that, you define the following key segments in your analytics tool and gauge the Taxonomy Navigation, Search, Product Engagement and Shopping Cart engagement behavior of these visitors:

• Visitors who spent less than 60 seconds
• Visitors who spent less than 180 seconds
• Visitors who spent between 180 and 300 seconds
• Visitors who spent between 300 and 600 seconds
• Visitors who spent between 600 and 900 seconds

Here is my favorite report template for “Time Spent per Visit” metric:

In case you have explored some other interesting applications of this metric, please add your comments below.

Categorised in: Web Analytics

This post was written by downtownecommerce_admin