How much time do you spend on a webpage before deciding whether to read more or not? Ten seconds? Thirty seconds? One minute? This is called dwell time, and in this article we'll learn more about how this metric affects your site.
In fact, it usually takes people just 15 seconds when they visit your site to decide whether to stay or not, which is why it's so important to get your visitors' attention and keep it.
However, if you're struggling to keep your visitors' attention, it can be frustrating trying to pinpoint what might be going wrong.
Fortunately, there are ways to give your site a little love so that people want to spend more time there.
In this blog, I'm going to show you how your site's design, content, and experience can contribute to your average visitor time on the page. We'll also cover the different terms and statistics you should be aware of, including bounce rate and exit rate, so you know exactly where your focus needs to be.
How do I measure how much time visitors spend on my site?
Before going into how to tweak your site, you should be aware of certain metrics that are critical to understanding what issues your site may have, including average time on page, bounce rate, exit rate.
By understanding why all three are important, you will have a clearer picture of the actions you should take to improve your site.
What is the average length of stay on a website?
The average time spent on a page is exactly what it sounds like. This metric is used to determine how much time a visitor spends on a page on your site, and it's crucial to understanding how to increase the time people spend on your site.
Pages with the least amount of time spent on them, especially content or blog pages, can be a cause for concern.
These are places that visitors should spend time and consume. If they aren't, your website or content may have issues.
Combined with the bounce rate, a low average time spent on a page can be disastrous for your site.
What is bounce rate?
According to HubSpot, "Your site's bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page on your site and then leave."
Basically, this means visitors go to a page on your site, don't click on anything or take any action, and then leave the page.
While visitors could have visited this page, done some reading, gathered the information they needed, and then left, there is usually a reason people leave a site without taking further action.
For example, if your website's homepage has a high bounce rate, there should be cause for concern.
However, if a blog post has a high bounce rate, there may be nothing to worry about depending on how long you spend on the page.
What is exit rate?
Like bounce rate, visitor exit rate measures what percentage of people leave your site from a specific page.
However, this page may have been the third or tenth page they visited on your site.
Essentially, exit rate is measuring the same metric as bounce rate (the number of visitors leaving your site from a given page), but exit rate applies when they've visited other pages on your site as well.
This means that exit rate is not as obvious a problem as bounce rate.
How do I measure bounce rate and exit?
There are a few different ways to measure your site's bounce and bounce rate, depending on the analytics package you use to crawl your site.
Use analytical tools and software. These analytics tools can measure the source of traffic that visitors come from, such as organic search, email, social media, paid search, and other sources.
Identifying your site's bounce rate on certain pages can help you focus your efforts on refining your visitor experience and increasing your time spent on your site.
By lowering the bounce rate, you'll increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site, and encourage more interaction.
How do I keep people on my site longer?
Now that we've established what bounce and exit rates are, let's take a look at ways to improve your site to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.
Three key components can impact how long visitors stay on your site:
- Design
- content
- EXPERIENCE
These are broad categories, so let's break them down into questions you can ask yourself to improve your site.
How can website design keep visitors engaged?
A poorly designed website can be distracting at best and unusable at worst.
If you want to keep visitors on your site, then having an engaging, high-quality design is very important. Here are some essential design aspects to consider for your website.
- page layout
- Use only relevant and high quality images
- Format content correctly with short sections and headers
What content can I use to keep visitors engaged and increase their time on my site?
No matter what other elements exist in a successful website, most visitors are there for good content.
Here's what you should consider to improve your content to keep people on your site.
It's important that whatever content you're creating or sharing really does what your headline says it will.
Most users click on a piece of content because the title addresses a problem or interest to them. If the content that follows doesn't address those questions or concerns, they'll likely leave it to other content that does.
People are much more likely to spend more time on a page with content relevant to the topic at hand.
This may seem like obvious advice, but you'd be surprised how often topics and content don't line up.
By creating rich and relevant content, you'll keep visitors engaged longer and encourage them to visit other pages on your site. That's the power of strong content.
How can I improve the user experience for engaging visitors?
Clear design and strong content are vital factors in providing your visitors with an overall positive experience while on your site.
However, there are still some other elements to consider when creating the best experience to increase the time you spend on your website.
Ads can be beneficial to your business if implemented correctly. Promoting downloadable content and other offers can encourage site visitors to take action and become leads, among other uses.
However, the wrong type of pop-up ads have the potential to drive people away from your site immediately.
Let's be honest: sometimes pop-up ads can be annoying. If used in the wrong way, they can cause people to question your site's credibility, as well as annoy users.
Essentially, you should stay away from pop-up spam and full-page ads that appear while your visitors are browsing content. Instead, use sidebar, entry, and exit pop-ups to capitalize on visitors' attention at three different points during their visit.
CTA to increase your time on your website
One of the most important elements in lowering bounce rates and increasing time spent on your website is implementing call-to-actions, or CTAs.
They not only help generate leads for your business, but they encourage interaction and provide visitor value.
CTAs also lower the bounce rate by navigating visitors to a new page and having them fill out a form, increasing the time spent on your site.
By having smart and relevant CTAs, you can build your business and give your time spent on site a boost.
So how do you apply all of this to increase your time on your website?
If you have a high bounce rate or little time spent on your site, you must absolutely take action.
With a high bounce rate and short average time on site, you have a slim chance of creating leads, which can hurt your business.
However, if you focus on the design, content and experience provided by your webpages, you can lower your bounce rate, increase the time your visitors spend on your website, as well as generate leads.
Conclusion on how to increase the length of time on your website
While the steps to increase the time visitors spend on your site cannot be done overnight, you can get better statistics by making small changes and continually optimizing your site.
With the information in this guide, you can create a better experience for your users and increase the time they spend on your site, increasing your brand and business value in the process.
With Colors Agency, we guarantee much more than just an attractive look and a modern layout for your website.
Our main focus is to offer companies around the world effective solutions to generate visibility on the internet.
Our agency develops SEO strategies as well as brand positioning for multinational companies, large, medium and small, all projects are important to us.
