The answer is “No”.
If you see Average session duration or Average time spent on page to be 0 (Zero), it doesn’t mean users have not spent any time on your site. It means your users have not visited more than a single url (page) on your website.
I recently started ranking on google for the keyword “DFP size mapping”. This was a blog on how to create responsive ads in Google ad manager. As per my google console there were quite a good number of hits via search engines. When I saw Average session duration to be 0 (zero) for most of my search engine visits, I got a feeling that people are not liking my article and maybe the content is not useful. I got a feeling that people are landing to my blog but are exiting immediately, that’s why my avg.session duration is 0.
But that’s not correct. I’ll explain how.
How is Avg. Session Duration calculated in Google analytics.
Avg. session duration is: sum of all session durations / total number of sessions.
For an example sum of all session durations is 500 minutes and total number of sessions on your selected date range is 100. Then the avg. session duration would be as follows:
Avg. session duration = 500 / 100 = 5 minutes.
How is session duration calculated in Google analytics for a page
Google analytics records the timestamps of user activity (hits or clicks). So the formula to calculate session duration is last click timestamp minus first click timestamp. This gives you the page session duration for a user.
See the example below to understand session duration calculation (recording)
Suppose there are two users User 1 and User 2, they both land to same website but on different urls. How is their activities recorded as sessions.
Activities of User 1
- Lands to the url yourdomain.com/1.htm at 10:15 am
- Clicks on the url yourdomain.com/2.htm at 10:25 am
- Exits the website at 10:30 am
- User 1’s session duration will be 10 minutes
Do you see the user actually spent 15 minutes on the website but the recorded session duration is only 10 minutes. This means Google analytics does not track the timestamp when the user exits (Bounce). So the first timestamp recorded was 10:15 am and last timestamp was 10:25 am (As it cannot record the bounce timestamp).
So the User 1’s session was 10:25 am (Last activity) minus 10:15 am (first activity) = 10 minutes.
Let’s see the activities of User 2
- Lands to the url yourdomain.com/3.htm 10:30 am
- Exits the website at 11:00 am
- User 2’s session duration will be 0
User 2 has the session duration 0 because he never visited any other page apart from the one where he landed. As Google analytics cannot record the exit (bounce), the last activity timestamp and first activity timestamp are same i.e. 10:30 am.
So User 2’s session was 10:30 am (last activity) minus 10:30 am (first activity) = 0
If the bounce rate is 100%, then the Avg. session duration will be 0.
So you see. This does not conclude that the content is not useful if the avg.session duration for a page is 0. User 2 spent 30 minutes on the site where as User 1 spend 15 minutes, still the session duration for user 2 was 0 (Zero).
Let’s see the time spent consuming the content on each of the urls and their individual session duration.
Yourdomain.com/1.htm
Time spent: 10 minutes
Session duration: 10 minutes
Yourdomain.com/2.htm
Time spent: 5 minutes
Session duration: 0
Yourdomain.com/3.htm
Time spent: 30 minutes
Session duration: 0
From the above stats the maximum time consuming the content was spent on yourdomain.com/3.htm. But the session duration is 0.
So next time when you see session duration for an individual page to be 0, don’t assume that the content is not useful. Maybe you need a better engagement through your website UI/UX so that users do not exit from the same page where they land.
But in my case it’s very obvious. Because it’s a how to article and people generally come looking for answers, and they bounce as soon they get it.
A trick which has worked for me to increase the average session duration is, showing a newsletter popup (or any other useful links) when people exit the site. Atleast the people who click on the popup links will not have the avg.session duration 0.
Now that you know how is average session duration is calculated, you should audit your website. Plan to increase the user activities which will eventually increase your avg. session duration. I’m still trying to find ways to achieve this, let me know how do you think you can lower your bounce rate. Lower bounce rate is equal to higer avg. session duration.