Average Session Duration is our first topic in our Google Analytics Metrics article series. Average Session Duration, as its name implies,  measures the average time visitors spend on your website during a single session.  This metric is important because longer sessions tend to indicate more engaging content.

Target Score:

The ideal score for your website depends on your site and the type of content on it.  Two minutes and higher is considered good. However,  if your site is filled with videos and long articles (over 1000 words), you’d want it to be higher. More time on the site indicates that visitors are reading the full article or watching the entire video. We can help you determine how long your average session should be for all of your web properties.

How Average Session Duration impacts SEO:

In general, a higher average session duration indicates more engaging content which helps with your site’s authority. From a search engine’s perspective, if people are spending more time on your site, they most likely are enjoying the content and/or are finding it useful.

How to improve Average Session Duration on your website:

The first step is to make the content on your site more engaging.  Some tips that we recommend are:

• Add more detailed content.
• Ensure your content addresses a need or problem facing your target audience.
• Run a spell check and grammar check on your site. Most visitors will leave a site if it’s full of errors.

If your content is good, the problem could be that the organization of your site could use work. Linking to related content and optimizing your navigation are two ways to fix this. We offer a complimentary website consultation to identify issues like this.