Bounce Rate vs Time on Site
Bounce rate is an indicator as to how people engage with your site and whether the landing page is relevant to what they are looking for. But better measurements of engagement include “time on site” (also called duration, average time on page, and dwell time), click-through rates, and the number of pages a user visits while on your site.
Armed with this information you will have a better understanding of whether your content is relevant and interesting for your users or not.
55% of Visitors Spend Fewer Than 15 Seconds on Your Website
http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/
What is “Time on Site”?
This is an average of the amount of time all visitors to a page spend on that particular page. This can be misleading as some people might leave the page open and go to lunch. But it is a pretty good reflection on how people are engaging with your content.
Illustration showing how Google Analytics measures your Time on Site
So what is a good “Time on site”
Time on Site is probably the best indicator that your content is working. Of course it depends on the particular pages length, purpose and the difficulty of the material but it can be a good indicator as to what is working.
Anything under 30 seconds would be considered not great and a possible cause for concern and anything over 2 minutes is outstanding. But this of course depends on your niche, and as I said earlier, depends on the difficulty and length of the material.
How to increase your “Time on Site”
The simplest way to increase the amount of time your users spend on your page is down to good content. Good content is useful, actionable, entertaining, relevant, and answers questions. Getting users to the content is the job of the headline. Keeping users on the site is the job of the content.
Getting people to read your content is an increasingly important measure and consideration for major internet content delivery companies. See Facebook’s recent announcement that they were going to give extra weight to longer news posts.
Tracking your “Time on Site” with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great way to find out how your users are interacting with your site. They, of course, have a section that tracks time on site which you can get to by going to Audience -> Overview to see the avg. session duration for your website.
To track time on site by channel go to Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels.
Conclusion
“Time on Site” is extremely important factor to find out what is and what is not working on your website. Google Analytics has the tool to see this and is a great place to start analysing your website SEO effectiveness.
