Visitor duration

[GeeWhizzler]

What is the typical duration for a user to spend on your website? Almost half my traffic spends 30 seconds or less on my site. I need a gauge of this.

Most importantly, what are steps I can take to make my users stay longer?

[webdude]

You're not gonna get users to stay unless they see something on your page that they want to see. I get a lot of referrals from the Search Engines and have found that if they are not finding the stuff they want, they are gone. Using the correct key phrases on your site is critical to get people to stay. If you are just trying to attract visitors, no one will stay. Make sure the info on your site correlates with what the user is looking for.

[netweight]

I run a troubleshooting Web site. The average visitor duration is about 2:30, but this is a figure I hardly ever consider.

The visitor duration needs a lot of qualification, for example, because a large number of visitors immediately leave the site (presumably because they are in the wrong place, "my" site is just part of a larger corporate site). So the average visit time of people who accomplish something useful on my site is considerably higher.

A factor that would tend to reduce the "real" average time is that some visitors who are "on" the page are actually multitasking (reading another Web page, drinking coffee).

If a visitor is on one of my pages less than a minute, I figure the troubleshooting value of that page for them is practically zero.

In that same way, you can be pretty sure that if it would take someone 1 minute to read one of your pages, then an average time on site of 30 seconds is not good news.

As mentioned, having interesting material is important. Also: Having unique material (copying from other sites isn't very interesting unless you've added something substantial to it). Also: Making sure your site is attracting the people you want. If your site is about supply-side economics and you're attracting hairdressers, there's nothing you can do to make them stay. In fact, you might want to consider finding a way to redirect as quickly as possible.

[topsites]

Now I feel this depends on the type of site is being run.

Like for a search engine or a Web link directory ... Here, the faster the visitor finds what they're looking for, the better. I can see someone loading google, typing in a search term, clicking search, and clicking OUT of google all in less than 20-30 seconds, easy. For some it may be a few minutes, but here any more than that is a sign of something is wrong.

But what about online games. Here they might spend some 20 or 30 minutes but there's no telling for sure unless a login is required. Same goes with forums, that's where folks will likely spend some time.

Graphic galleries, articles, things like these will hold them, while with link lists and yes with un-targeted / miss-targeted traffic visitors will leave almost as soon as they arrive.

Also don't take your statistics as a sure-fire indicator of what is going on, there is no telling how long visitors are spending on your site unless they are required to login and then they DO something afterwards (such as what I am doing here now).

As for me, whenever I see visitors are spending less than 2 minutes on my site, I start working on the site, and I work on it a lot and then some, and that usually helps a little.

I find organization helps keep them around, so I usually work on straightening things out, get rid of a couple them pieces of spam (sorry i got some spam on my site too but sometimes it has to go), also load-times are VERY important. Better code, you know, upgrade and update things a bit, clean it up some and add more related stuff, better than what you already have if you can find it, and you should be set.

Good luck, and don't let it bother you too much.

p.s.: here's my averages:
0s-30s......72.8 %
30s-2mn.....7 %
2mn-5mn.....4.4 %
5mn-15mn....4.9 %
15mn-30mn...3.4 %
30mn-1h.....3.4 %
1h+.........3.1 %
So in the end, it doesn't really matter because stats have no real way of knowing when a visitor left... They might've kept an article open and been reading for an hour before they closed the browser - All this is invisible to the counter.

[ColinVox]

So in the end, it doesn't really matter because stats have no real way of knowing when a visitor left... They might've kept an article open and been reading for an hour before they closed the browser - All this is invisible to the counter.

That really depends on the technology that you are utilizing. I'm using Sales-n-Stats software at my websites that is able to detect how long the visitor stayed at each page and when he left site. It is using Javascript ping to determine whether the visitor is still on the site.
If the user minimized the browser or went for some cofee it marks the visitor as sleeping so this fact can also be taken into account.
And, yes I also find information about visit duration very useful, to estimate how tareted the incoming traffic is.