Measure How Long Visitors Stay on Your Website

Part of the Small Business IT For Dummies Cheat Sheet (Australian Edition)

Measuring the amount of time visitors spend on your website provides important insight. You can figure out whether visitors are taking a quick look, then leaving, or whether they’re hanging around a bit longer and actually reading your online material with the view to possibly taking action.

If the majority of your website visitors aren’t staying long, review your site content and look at ways to attract and hold visitors’ attention. Search engines, such as Google, also measure the amount of time visitors spend on your site and this information contributes to where your site is placed in their rankings.

For search engines, this measure is called stickiness and is calculated according to the time that elapses between a user clicking on your link on the search engine’s results page and returning to click on the next link in the search listing.