Average Engagement Time is the length of time users engage with your site. This metric assesses how interested your content users are. It relies on how long someone actively engages with the content.

In general, how long a user spends on a page can depend on user intent and how much information is on the page.

Longer pages tend to have more extended engagement, but longer content doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. Users might spend a lot of time on the page because they are searching for the answers they need, which you might express better with less content. Therefore, you’ll want to consider engagement time alongside the page’s goals.

Bounce Rate

Any time you consider engagement time, you should also consider the page’s bounce rate, which gives you a black-and-white source of truth about whether or not users are engaging the page.

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page on your site and spend 0 seconds there before leaving. When someone leaves a page immediately, the user “bounces.” Usually, people bounce because of a technical issue, such as a page taking too long to load, or they leave the page because it doesn’t match the intent of their search query. The page didn’t have what they were looking for.

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Q: What if my users’ Average Engagement Time and/or User Engagement Duration is low?

A: An engaged session is a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least two pageviews or screenviews.

Ten seconds is the minimum time a user would spend to be considered “engaged.” The longer a user spends on a page, the more engaged they are.

Example: If you’re trying to promote a page about an event for veterans seeking benefits, Facebook may promote your ad to users who have shown an interest in local veterans’ affairs, state and federal veteran benefits, veteran events, etc.

If you encounter a short user engagement time, ask the following:

Which page is the user visiting? If the page’s sole objective is to prompt users to click a button, then a short engagement duration may be good, especially if they follow through and take action.

How can you adjust the content strategy? Here’s a checklist of different things to ask yourself:

• Is the most critical information at the page’s bottom so users leave after a long scroll?
• Is your language dense and hard to understand?
• Is there a lot of text everywhere, potentially propelling the user to leave?
• Are your CTAs short, punchy, and declarative?
• Is the content appropriate to the page and attractive?
• Is the page doing the job that it initially set out to do?
• Does the page match the search intent?
• Is the web page SEO-optimized?
• Or are people landing on the page from a search engine looking for something else?

Learn more about creating successful on-page content. >