Visit Duration: How to break down the Average of Averages to apply better web marketing efforts

This week I'm applying basic web metrics to my page, susansullivancincinnati.weebly.com (formerly susansullivanmorgantown.com), to see what they mean for my website and how I can improve it.  I've already touched on bounce rate, and now I'm going to look at visit duration how I can improve it for my personal brand.

Visit duration is a characterization of a visit to my website, or "the length of time in a session" (Reed College of Media, 2014).  WebAnalyticsWorld tells me that a lot of metrics, including average visit duration, is the average of other metric averages.  Yeah - it's the average of the average amount of time that people visit my page from different sources (Sharma, 2013).  It seems best to divide these traffic referrals down and look at the average visit duration from each source.

As I discovered in my past post on bounce rate, the majority of my referrals are complete bunko that provide me with no real data on visits to my page:

If I flip the average session duration the other way, though, it looks like I have a lot of useful information here.

When I share my website on Twitter, more people seem to spend more time on my website.  Organic searches from Yahoo are about half that length, and seem to fall around the same length of time as Google and Bing searches.

This infographic helped me to understand the connection between visit duration and how my pages are shared.

Maldre, M. (22 April 2014). Social media: referral traffic vs. engagement. MattMaldre.com. Retrieved November 3, 2014, from http://mattmaldre.com/tag/infographic/.

Yeah, I can definitely see this reflected in my analytics!  Social Media like Twitter gets me the most referral traffic and those that stay the longest, but the bounce rate (or level of engagement with my page) is much lower for search engines and social media with "thicker content," like Google and LinkedIn.  

John Deitrich of WeDoWebContent.com explains that taking a look at the overall average visit duration is shortchanging your reports.  "Taking note of which social sources give you the highest average visit duration can help you how to best focus your marketing efforts," he wrote late last year (2013). If I'm not seeing very high numbers from my blog in these high-return social media like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and StumbleUpon, then I need to spend more time sharing and adapting my content for these websites.  For example. I'm only seeing referrals from Twitter in the last month (October 3 - November 3).  It would behoove me and my website traffic numbers to spend time in these and the other arenas that lend me to the highest average visit duration in order to make this average number higher overall.

I'll do more of this as I share my class blog posts on my website.  You can also see how I looked into bounce rate to see how it affected my page and my personal brand marketing efforts.

Deitrich, J. (13 Dec 2013). Google Analytics: analyzing visit duration to improve web marketing. WeDoWebContent.com. Retrieved November 3, 2014, from http://www.wedowebcontent.com/blog/google-analytics-analyzing-visit-duration-improve-web-marketing/#sthash.ZmFuxn3r.dpuf.

Maldre, M. (22 April 2014). Social media: referral traffic vs. engagement. MattMaldre.com. Retrieved November 3, 2014, from http://mattmaldre.com/tag/infographic/.