What you can Learn from your User’s “Avg. Time on Page”

If you have ever taken the time to look through the Google Analytics for your website, you may have felt a little overwhelmed at all the terminology, unless you are in the marketing world, perhaps. Sifting through data is time consuming at best, especially without a built-in process, and a threat to the quality of your mental health at its worst. One thing that can help as you get started is just getting a better understanding of what the terms you are seeing actually mean for the person on the other end. You may have seen “bounce rate” thrown around.

To put it simply, a high percentage (45% or above site-wide)

of “bounce rate” means your page is

not engaging your customers.

They are coming to view one page, and then

hitting the digital highway.

But is that always true??

“Avg. Time on Page” is like the quiet brother of “bounce rate” though, and the one that tells the other side of the story. Typically, people do look at bounce rate to find out if their content is engaging customers, but the truth is, it depends on what your website is trying to do.

If your website is largely a space for your blogs,

for instance, you may want to check out your

“Avg. Time on Page” data to get a

more complete picture.

It is normal for somebody to visit only one page when coming to your website if they are looking for a specific blog, or even if they visit your blog frequently. To see if they are ‘getting what they came for,’ so to speak, you can see how long they are spending on that page. If the data shows the time is short (depends on your page type, but likely less than 2 minutes for blogs), then it is probably time to tweak some things.