How Can Increased Time on Page Boost Conversions?

Attracting traffic to a website can be a big challenge, even for the most experienced professionals.

However, more than just herding the masses to your digital spot in the world, it is essential to understand what they’re doing when they’re there. And what they’re NOT doing as well.

One of the most important indicators in your Google Analytics report is the Average Session Duration. If your visitors are abandoning your website without spending a decent amount of time checking it out, chances are something is not working as it should.

This could be happening for one or more reasons. Investigating the causes through experiments is critical to understanding your public. There is no absolute truth in marketing, and everything can be tweaked to perform even better.

Keeping user experience in mind is essential in times of task overload

The enormous amount of information that’s being thrown at us online is forcing us to learn faster what’s important and what’s not. Pop-ups, banners, native advertising: look around and you’ll see that you are completely surrounded. Thankfully, like the sight of your own nose, your brain just filters them out and disregards the majority of those.

We developed the habit of going straight to the answer to our questions by “scanning” text or searching for terms with a “ctrl+F” command. The number of shares, the size of the fonts, a user-friendly layout; there are many key elements that will determine if you are hanging around or running away from a website.

Unconsciously, we are always measuring the effort required to consume content

Remember that time you looked for a dinner recipe on YouTube and decided to watch a video that’s 5 minutes instead of another one that was 12-minutes long? Why did you do that?

Video and audio have a fundamental decision factor displaying right in your face: the time it takes to watch/listen. In the end, because we’re always busy, we do everything possible to avoid wasting time.

Overcome your visitor’s objections

As you probably know, there’s a massive amount of written content online. According to WordPress, around 80 million posts are published every month using their platform. Take the Creative Agency Secrets’ website as an example: organic search is responsible for 80% of our traffic and the overwhelming majority lands first on one of our blog posts. But we are not the only ones. More companies are using this as a strategy to bring traffic every day.

With so many options out there, your audience has to feel assured that the time invested in reading your content is worth it. One of the visual tricks we use is subtle but powerful: we tell people how long it’ll take them to read our posts. Moreover, a little coloured bar on the top of the screen shows the progress of your reading while you scroll down the page.

Showing the estimated time needed to read an article might calm down the reader’s anxiety. It increases the likelihood of the visitors to finish reading the text because, in their minds, they’ve already allocated that precise amount of minutes for that.

More time spent on your website, more chances of conversion

Worst than not attracting visitors is wasting what you already have. Traffic by itself is useless if your website does not have a clear objective. It might be getting new leads, selling products on your e-commerce, giving you a call, etc. When you increase the time on page, the visitor is spending more minutes experiencing your brand and one step closer to fulfilling your objective.