Average Time on Page
It’s very important to pay attention to the amount of time visitors spend on your pages. The average time on a page is a good indicator for predicting the amount of the time a reader spends with your stories.
A short average time on page can indicate a number of things. The reader may be bored. The reader may be upset with something on the page. The reader may have been distracted by something else on the page. The reader may have been misled about the content of the story.
Or visitors may have an issue with the website. It may be loading too slowly or have too many pop-ups for their taste. Regardless of the motive, if the average time spent on a page is low, any option is possible, and it needs to be taken seriously.
Another possibility is that visitors did not find what they were looking for. Could this be a misleading social post or headline? Convincing readers to visit a page doesn’t truly expand your reach if they exit quickly, so be sure that your content delivers what is promised.
A note about limitations: Google Analytics, and most other programs that track readership metrics, can only measure the time spent on pages when the visitor hops to another page on the website.
If the visitor exits immediately, the amount of time spent on that page is counted as 0:00. Actual time spent on page is only measured for page views where the viewer continued on to another page.
Therefore, websites with high bounce rates don’t always have accurate measurements of average time on page.