In terms of web metrics, visit duration refers to the amount of time a visitor spends at a domain. As an aggregated metric, it can refer to the average visit duration of all visitors. This type of metric belong to the "visit characterization" family of metrics, which help site operators better understand the trends and behaviors of visitors while at the domain.
While page visits, impressions, total visits, and unique visitors are metrics that often receive a great deal of attention, visit duration has the capability to tell the domain operator things other metrics cannot. The aforementioned metrics can be more direct in telling the story of how much notice a web campaign received, but not necessarily in measuring the impact and success of a message and its ability to capture the visitor's attention and interest. Additionally, impressions and visits do not necessarily correlate to conversions, which might be defined as email or SMS subscriptions, social media shares, or number of purchases. Long visit duration alone does not guarantee conversions, but tends to positively correspond with more engagement, more link interaction, and more repeat visits and frequency.
Yaro Starak analyzed the value of visit duration in an entry to his marketing website, Entrepreneur's Journey. According to Starak, creating engagement content and facilitating community building are key ways to increase visit duration. This can be done by simply adding more content (which can include articles, supplementary information, how-tos, customer testimonials, etc). Additionally, creating visitor forums can be a good way to build site loyalty and boost favorable metrics. Some great examples of tactics to increase visit duration include news websites creating live streamed events, Youtube's investment in algorithmic "selected for you" videos and suggesting similar content, or even Amazon's "other visitors also viewed" product recommendations. In the eyes of the visitor, these advents save them time and effort - but they can also increase their visit duration on your domain and discourage "bounces."
Despite the helpfulness of the visit duration metric, it needs to be understood as a supplement to other metrics. As noted by the marketing source group, Wholewhale, a long visit duration might mean that visitors are having technical difficulties with your website. If this isolated to mobile visitors, it could mean that your site is not well adapted to mobile browsers and is frustrating visitors. Long visit duration, but low conversions, recency, or frequency (of visits) should signal to a domain operator that they are not reaping metric rewards from long visit duration, and there may be other problems standing in the way.
Some supplementary metrics to look at include page visit time (so that the pages visitors linger on can be enhanced, replicated, or if needed, repaired) and page views per visit. These metrics could help the domain operator identify their successful content and modify their site to showcase their most popular, longest viewed, and most revisited content. Recency and frequency can also be considered as metrics related to the helpfulness, popularity, and success of web content.
So, summarily, visit duration is a small piece of the picture, but it has the potential to highlight a domain's strengths or weaknesses. If an organization's goal with their web presence is to build an online community and foster engagement and loyalty, visit duration can be a great supplementary metric for gauging the desirability of their content and how well it fulfills the needs and wants of visitors.
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