Time on site

The time on site indicates how long a visitor spends on your site. The measure looks at how interesting your visitors find your site. If they spend a few minutes on the site then you’re providing the content they are looking for. Our analytics will allow you to find out time spent per page too but as a general guide the time spent on site is a good starting point.

If the time on site is not very high then it is worthwhile looking at the reasons this might be the case. They are likely to be the same as the reasons for a higher bounce rate. Have a read here about them.

One of the most useful things to look at with the time on site is times on page for directed visitors. To find this you’ll have to look at the detailed analytics pages. If you’re one of our customers and you need some help please feel free to get in touch by phone or email. Once you’ve found the pages you can look at the time spent on site.

If you’re directed visitors aren’t spending much time on a page then you’ve probably got an issue to address. Follow the bounce fixing ideas or those given in this blog post about visitors. Don’t forget that directed visitors are likely to be people that are not church members and so they are important people to reach. They may never come in contact with a church apart from this one webpage so you should spend time trying to get the page right.

Using our system you can also follow the pages people go to after they have visited a page. This means that you can look at the directed landing page and then follow where the user goes next. If they don’t go anywhere then you should upgrade the page to entice them to look at other pages. For example if it’s a page about summer club why not include some information about other activities for kids or teenagers. Something that is relevant and related.

If visitors are moving from directed pages to other pages are you in control of where they are going or are they going to random pages? If they are moving to random pages you can figure out what is the most interesting by looking at time on the follow on pages. You’ll most likely find that some of the pages have higher on page time than others. If that’s the case then you can assume that the people coming to the directed page find those follow on pages interesting so change the page to emphasise the links to those pages.

By looking at the directed pages and follow on pages you can improve the experience for people that perhaps don’t come to church much. These are of course the people you want to reach out to with God’s Word. This is a really worthwhile activity. Although it might seem a short term activity (since the directed pages are often for only one event). You will find that the activity is applicable to all your events. You’ll pick up from your analysis how the directed visitors are likely to react. This means that when you come to a new directed page (for a new event) you’ll be more effective in building it.

One final thought for you. When you build a directed page do you only build one page? It’s worthwhile thinking about whether you need more than one page. Why not consider building the follow page?