Content Marketing
What Is Time on Page? Your Complete Guide
What is time on page? Could AI content affect the time users spend on your site? Get insight into average engagement time and why it’s an important content marketing metric.
According to Hubspot, readers spend an average of 54 seconds of time on page. The study they referenced evaluated time on page for a number of industries, including B2B (business to business), consumer electronics, and finance.
However, when readers find content interesting, time on page can increase well beyond 54 seconds because people are spending more time on your website engaging with your content.
So, what exactly is time on page from a content marketing perspective, why does time on page matter, and how could AI impact it? That’s exactly what we’ll be looking into in this article.
As noted by SEMRush, time on page is a website metric that details how much time a user spends on a given site before going to another page or leaving altogether.
Similar to bounce rate (which measures users leaving a page), it’s a good indicator of how engaging or interesting your content is to your readers.
A short time on page (and, or a high bounce rate) means users didn’t find what they were looking for and left.
Generally, time on page is measured from the moment a user lands on a page until the moment they go elsewhere or leave the site. This is then divided by the number of active users.
There are a number of tools that can measure this, including Google Analytics.
In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), this is now noted as the average engagement time. They offer the following definition for how average engagement time is calculated:
“Average engagement time = (The total length of time your website was in focus or your app was in the foreground across all sessions) / (The total number of active users)” - Google
Time on page is a good indicator of how well your content is performing. Here are some of the top reasons that time on page (or average engagement time) is important to measure:
If time on page is generally longer, it means that users find your content informative or interesting. They’re interacting with the material, finding answers to their questions and generally sending signals that “this page is relevant to my search.”
In contrast, a shorter time on page means the opposite. They may not have found what they were looking for or the content might not match the search intent.
So, checking time on page can also help you determine which pieces of content resonate most with your audience. If you write different types of content, like comparisons, how-to guides, or listicles, it can give you insight into what readers are engaging with the most and what types of content to focus on for your content strategy.
For those web pages that are optimized for conversions, including e-commerce product pages, landing pages, or blogs with CTAs, a high time on page is a good thing.
Users are absorbing the information you’re sharing, and there’s a much higher chance they’ll take the action you want them to as a result of your content.
A recent study by Neil Patel entitled “You Are Wasting Your Time Using AI to Create Content” found that human-crafted content outranked AI content 94% of the time.
The study was run with over 700 articles, half generated by AI and half by human writers.
So, in that context, if people primarily prefer reading human-written content (as indicated by higher rankings and more robust traffic levels), what does that mean for time on page?
AI content could decrease time on the page due to generic, generated content. One of the top issues with AI-generated content is that it’s generic and doesn’t provide the original insight that people (and Google) prefer.
Beyond time on page there are a number of other considerations with AI content as well. For instance, Google may penalize AI content if it doesn’t comply with spam guidelines.
Then, AI can also produce AI hallucinations or make statements that it presents as fact but are actually incorrect.
So, the best practice is to use AI to support original, human-written content.
Some top strategies for incorporating AI into the content creation process include:
Time on page or average engagement time, as Google Analytics 4 (GA4) refers to it, is an important part of content marketing strategies and metrics.
Monitoring time on page, can provide marketers and web publishers with insight into whether particular pages or blog posts are relevant and engaging readers. This, in turn, can help hone marketing efforts to create more content that is highly engaging for readers.
Looking for more ways to improve your content strategy? Check out our top guides:
