The use Case for Visit Duration
Visit duration has a lot of pros and cons to its use case with the main plus being it can track how long people are on your site with the con being that it only works on a loaded pages event. This means that while it can keep track of how long people are on your site it will only work if the viewers are loading new pages which means if they only see on page and leave you will see and time duration of zero seconds which can be misleading. This means that for sites where most of your content is on one page it is not a useful metric but with sites like blogs or shopping websites where there are plenty of clickable link this metric thrives in.
Applying Visit Duration
When using visit duration as a metric there is something important to keep in mind that time duration doesn’t mean success. For example if you run a shopping website and you see an avg. time duration much higher than maybe a week ago and you made changes, maybe you did find success or maybe the new site has become frustrating and confusing which can negatively impact your website traffic. For our site ProjectDigital visit duration can be very beneficial because it is very easy to navigate between blog to blog so it makes the metric much more accurate. In order to make it more accurate though we could filter out bounces meaning that all the people who visit one page and are done reading won’t be included into the data which accomplishes two things, one you get a much more accurate visit duration and two you also get to see how many people are visiting more than one page and who you are really connecting with.