What is the average visitor session duration for your best site?

[MichaelCorfman]

As affiliates, we want to build sites that generate money for us. On the one hand, that means when our visitors are looking for a place to play, we want to help them do that, as quickly and as efficiently as possible. On the other hand, we want them to value our site, and hopefully visit on a regular basis, so that we can create a relationship with the player that benefits our bottom line over the long term. That means keeping them our our site longer.

One measure of how interesting and valuable visitors find our site is how frequently they return. Another is how long visitors stay on our sites.

For this week's poll take a look at how long visitors stay on your site. If you use Google Analytics, that's easy since "Avg. Session Duration" is one of the basic statistics provided on the Audience Overview page for a site. If you want, in Google Analytics you can set the overview to show a graph of average session duration, and a time period running when you began using Google Analytics to the present time, to see whether your average session duration has changed over time. It's an interesting way to look the effect of any major changes you have made to your sites.

Besides voting in the poll based on the Average Session Duration of your site with the largest value, share in a post how much it varies from site to site of yours if you have multiple sites. And share which visitor statistics you pay the most attention to above and beyond the number of visitors you have to your sites.

Michael

[MichaelCorfman]

For Casino City, our best site in terms of visitor duration is our site focused on online gaming, and where we try to make our money. That site, online.casinocity.com, has an average visitor duration of over three minutes, but less than three and a half minutes. That site also has our lowest bounce rate at 56%. Other sites we operate pull in lots of visitors, but if they are interested on online gaming we try to send them to online.casinocity.com to find a place to play. Our other sites have shorter average session durations. On the very low end we have one site with an average session duration of 42 seconds, probably in large part because that site has our highest bounce rate - around 87%.

Michael

[DanHorvat]

It varies greatly among my sites, both the ones I have now and the ones I had in the past, but I haven't noticed a correlation between average visit length and the conversion rate or returning visitors percentage.

The nature of content dictates visit length. If you own an article-based site, with articles 500+ words in length, anything under 02:00 would be a poor result. On the other hand, if the website just provides simple information and quickly channels the visitor towards the operator (e.g. no deposit bonuses list), visit length and bounce rate are irrelevant as you do want the visitor to leave quickly.

For article-based sites, here's a quick tip for increasing the visit length. People only skim through the title and maybe the first two sentences in an article, so you got to write a good lede to hook the visitor and make him read the rest of the article. It doesn't matter how good or bad your article is as a whole, the title and the lede make all the difference.

[Christiaan]

My website is article based. But I also have a big banner slider and a list of best bonusses on top. These 2 things are very popular on my website and make the visitors leave quickly.
The avarage time a visitor is on my site is 1:46 in the last 30 days.

Because my best website was created almost 3 years ago as an after work project I didn't put so much effort in the layout. Now I'm playing with the thought to do a big redesign and maybe completely change the backend.
I don't really like the current design of my website. And if I don't like it, my visitors have probably the same idea.
The redesign will also result in a longer session time on the website.

[RacingJim]

From start Oct til today: 06:01 for my main site.

[sweetbet]

The average session duration of my main site is 05:27. I'm not sure how much this figure is affected by the amount of time that I spend on the site, updating and adding new content.

[MichaelCorfman]

The average session duration of my main site is 05:27. I'm not sure how much this figure is affected by the amount of time that I spend on the site, updating and adding new content.

In the case of Casino City we are careful to exclude our own access from Google Analytics results even though our internal traffic has to represent a very small portion of the overall traffic to our sites.

Under Google analytics for a site, if you select Admin, one of the options is Filters. In our case we exclude all of our internal IP addresses using this filter.

Michael

[casinoplanet]

My latest stats are:

Google cpc 3-3.5 minutes, bounce rate 29%
Google organic 2-2.5 minutes, bounce rate 69%
Yahoo organic 3-3.5 minutes, bounce rate 37%
Bing cpc 5-5.5 minutes, bounce rate 34%
Bing organic 4-4.5 minutes, bounce rate 33%

In general, mobile visits stay longer and have a lower bounce rate than pc.

[Christiaan]

In the case of Casino City we are careful to exclude our own access from Google Analytics results even though our internal traffic has to represent a very small portion of the overall traffic to our sites.

Under Google analytics for a site, if you select Admin, one of the options is Filters. In our case we exclude all of our internal IP addresses using this filter.

Michael

Thanks for this tip Michael! I didn't know this. I'm sure this will give me more accurate statistics.

[wettFORM.AT]

It depends on the day of the week and it depends on the traffic origin and the landing page as well. Some pages have more time on page some less. When you have articles then the time duration of course is longer. Depending on the mentioned factors and pages from 2 to more than 5 minutes.

[jani2500]

In my websites the avarage is about between 2 and 3 minutes.. sometimes less

[RacingJim]

Thanks for this tip Michael! I didn't know this. I'm sure this will give me more accurate statistics.

Definitely worth doing, I try and keep my stats as accurate as possible including putting filters on to exclude semalt and various other spammy crap that appears as referrals.

[ocreditor]

Around Three and a half minutes

[Zuga]

LCB our strongest site obv, has an average time spent of 00:12:16 with a bounce rate 32.60%

[PROFRBcom]

wow, those are some long avg visit times!

IIRC GA counts single page visits as bounces much of the time and doesn't record the duration I recall seeing some code to alter that, but I bookmarked it and forgot about it until just now...

[Triple7]

About a 1,5 minute, bounce rate is about 35%.

[allfreechips]

AFC comes in at 5:15 average with a BR of 52%. Lot of people on the flow chart check basic new items quickly and leave but as long as they come back daily that's all good with me as well

[golfbettingsystem]

Varies considerably from day to day based depending on the content that's been published, however averages out at 4:57 overall.

[dfiocch]

FEC, avg visit duration 0:10:20 - BR 40,2%