Let’s face it; a lot of the content we need to write for our business agenda and marketing campaigns can get boring. It often needs organization and a bit of a pick-me-up to encourage readers to continue reading. During our May Marketing Madness Series, we ran Attention Heatmaps and watched hundreds of Visitor Recordings, just to keep track of exactly what content was engaging visitors. Here is what worked for us to increase visitor engagement times that can work for you too.

Bold, Bulleted Content

I know it’s true. We are always pointing out how bold wording and organized bullet points (as well as images below) can make your written content that much more engaging for users. But now we’ve got the ultimate proof.

What is interesting about the heatmap here below? Most of the attention time is actually not above the fold, but below. There is now no doubt that visitors were really concentrating on the content and drawn to the bold words and bulleted content in this section of the page.

Todd Follansbee's article on The Brain's View of a Website...readers of the blog mainly focus their highest attention times on the middle of the article, even below the fold. Long Engagement Times are mostly on bulleted content and bolded text.

Another interesting discovery. Readers of the attention heatmap below did focus most of their attention at the top and gradually engaged less with the lower sections UNTIL towards the end of the post, when they again heavily engaged with bold, bulleted content.

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Time on Page

Time on page, engagement time, and loading time…three important online metrics that e-businesses often tend to miscalculate or misinterpret. Make sure your analytics solution clearly breaks down these three metrics for you so you’re not stuck designing your website with inaccurate data.

Time on Page – The Overestimated Metric

Time on Page: Traditional Analytics will often measure the amount of time it takes for a visitor to go from one page to another. However, the calculated time on page does not always accurately describe the actual amount of time a visitor spent on a page, rather the amount of time between pages.

From the time a page is opened, a visitor could get up, go to the bathroom, have lunch, run a 5K, take a shower and only then navigate to another page. In addition, if there was only one page view, time on page would be calculated as 0 seconds since there would be no other page to subtract and calculate the time difference. Needless to say, this is extremely inaccurate.

Time on Page is a particularly dangerous metric for the multiple tab browser as well as the multitask user, always leaving one page open and on to engage with another. So, when you look at this metric, bear in mind its limitations. A good way to address these issues is by looking at other metrics that may be more reliable and provide a better insight, such as the ones listed below.

Engagement Time: The metric you really need

Engagement Time^TM: This is the amount of time visitors are actually interacting with your webpage, whether it be scrolling, clicking, moving the mouse, or typing. The longer the engagement time, the more interest visitors have in your page and your website. Engagement time refers to the amount of time visitors really engage with the page, and not just have the browser open on that page. Engagement time can be considered a micro conversion for some websites, and is generally considered a good step towards an overall “macro” conversion.

On a single visit, a visitor kept a particular webpage open for 1.11 hrs. However, the amount of time that the visitor was actually interacting with the page was only 53 sec...quite a time difference.

Page Load Time: The Need for Speed

Loading Time: This is the amount of time it takes for a single page of your website to fully load on your visitor’s browser. While your aim for Engagement Time is to increase the length of time a visitor engages with the page, the aim for Page Loading time is to minimize it. The internet is meant to save us time and frustration, not cause more. Therefore, the more time your pages take to load, the more likely visitors are to abandon your page and navigate to another site. It is also well known that page load time is one of the parameters Google checks for its Page Rank, so slow loading pages may harm your site in this regard as well.

As original and show stopping we might wish to make our landing page, if it’s too flashy (huge videos, images, Flash based, or any other reason the page would take ages to load), it may actually end up hindering your site performance, rather than enhancing it.

Visitors should be spending their time interacting with your webpages, not waiting for them to load. Therefore, in order to increase visitors’ engagement time and your chances for more conversions, optimizing page load time is a quick easy fix that can make a huge difference on your bottom-line.

About the Author

Hadas Sheinfeld is the Director of Product at ClickTale, in charge of the ClickTale Product Roadmap and all new features. Her main concern is making ClickTale the best Customer Experience Analytics tool available, combining top notch functionality with fantastic user experience to create a product people love using. Hadas holds an M.Sc. in Occupational Psychology from the University of London.

What’s wrong with “Time on Page”?

Last week, we looked at “Time on Page”, a statistic used by most traditional web analytics to gauge user interaction within a webpage. And while we weren’t Google-bashing (really, we weren’t!), we did point out some very serious inaccuracies with Google Analytics’ method of calculating “Time on Page”.

In this post we’ll be talking about “Engagement Time”, which measures exactly how long your visitors are actually interacting with your content. We’ll be looking closely at how it works, what it tells you, and how you can ultimately use it to improve your web content, conversion rates and ROI.

“Time on Page” vs “Engagement Time”

Traditionally, “Time on Page” tells you one thing and one thing only – how long a visitor has a web page open for. However, we’ve seen from countless observations that users will often open a new tab, minimize their browser or even go off and do something else while browsing a site. All of this is normal browsing behavior, but it gives rise to one major point: “Time on Page” tells you nothing about how long your visitors actually interact with your online content!

Time on Page can change drastically, as it can be skewed by normal browsing behavior Engagement Time however, provides steady, reliable and more representative statistic

Knowing how long your visitors spend interacting with each page is vital. You need to know what content keeps your visitors interested, what keeps them busy, and what bores them. For example:

• If you have a product features page, then you want to maximize your customer’s interaction with the page, keeping them interested until they convert.
• On the other hand, if you have a signup form, you want to keep the necessary user actions to a minimum, improving usability and minimizing form abandonment.

Knowing how long the average customer really takes to convert or fill out a form is the critical first step towards tightening the funnel and increasing your conversion rates.

That’s where “Engagement Time” comes in. ClickTale can tell you how long customers actually spend reading your content, looking at your pictures, watching your videos and browsing your products. Not just how long they had a page open for, but how long that page held their attention, and whether or not they liked what they saw.
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Time on Page and Engagement Timeâ„¢

We love Google Analytics, we always have. Just like ClickTale it’s free, easy to set up, comes with a lot of helpful tools, and is a great way to collect analytical information about your site. However, there are several things Google Analytics just can’t tell you, and in this post we’re going to talk about two of them:

1. Google Analytics cannot tell you anything about bounced visitors! These are visitors that come to your site, only look at the page they land on, and decide to leave. These are the potential customers you didn’t get, they are the lost sales, lost leads and lost profits.
2. Google Analytics gives you no information about how long your visitors actually interact with your online content. All it can see is the amount of time a page was left open, which doesn’t tell you anything about how long your visitors were actually looking at your content.

And now we’re going to tell you why…

Like most traditional web analytics services, Google Analytics records a “Time on Page”, denoting the time a visitor spends looking at each page in your website. It does this in three stages:

1. It records the time your visitor opens the first page.
2. It records the time your visitor opens the next page.
3. It subtracts these two times and calls the result “Time on Page”.

This method has been used by Google since it started it’s analytics service back in 2006, and while it is a simple way to gauge user interaction, Google Analytics’ method for calculating “Time on Page” and “Bounced Visitors” is woefully inaccurate!

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Nielsen NetRatings’ newly released ‘total minutes’ metric measures a site’s popularity based on how many minutes a page was open.  The new release is an improvement over the old ‘page views’ metric which does not take into account the duration of time for which a page was open on a user’s computer. Though an improvement over the older system, ‘total minutes’ does not take in to account the coffee and bathroom breaks of it’s human users. How often have you dropped whatever you were doing on line to go scavenging for food, or to run to the appointment you’ve forgotten about? In our case, it happens every day. Obviously, these sorts of incidents have the potential to skew the results significantly.

Enter ‘Engagement Timeâ„¢’, the technology employed by ClickTale’s analytics. Engagement Timeâ„¢ values the time a user has spent interacting with a page, rather than just the amount of time a page has been left open. Even if you haven’t left your desk chair all morning, there is a pretty good chance that you’re surfing three, four, or even more sites at the same time. Maybe you’ve left something running on your screen to share with a colleague who’s out to lunch. Maybe you were the kind of kid whose mother had to remind them to put away whatever toy you were playing with before taking out a new one. Even though you finished reading the New York Times online edition before your coffee break, you may have neglected to close that window while working with another program.

ClickTale, being aware of this phenomenon, and sensitive to the obstacles it poses, began including Engagement Time™ technology in their recording services more than a year ago. Using Engagement Time™ as a part of ClickTale produces more accurate and meaningful results than any other metrics system on the market.

So go ahead and signup for ClickTale, you can even take a coffee break in the middle of the process. We don’t mind .

“ClickTale has allowed us to build a profile of our visitors that has shown us complexities we never knew existed. They are like the Sigmund Freud of the web analytics industry.”

- Ben Kuikman, Creative Marketing Specialist
http://www.pass-port.com/

Passport Software, Inc. specializes in business accounting software and serves over 10,000 customers through a network of 250 partners worldwide. Their current site, created about four years ago, is used mostly as an information portal for their distributors and end users.  It receives between 150 to 200 hits per day.

Ben Kuikman, Creative Marketing Specialist at Passport, first read about ClickTale through a review published on TechCrunch, a web 2.0 blog. He is currently running the ClickTale service on nearly twenty of his most visited pages. He found ClickTale’s setup to be an easy and a smooth experience. Although he has only been using ClickTale for a few weeks, it has already revealed some new information about his site; Surprisingly, the pathways that visitors use to navigate his site and the depth to which they browse proved to be much greater than he’d originally thought. More importantly, ClickTale’s heatmaps have shown him that 65 – 100% of his users –an unusually high amount–  actually scroll all the way to the bottom of his longer webpages. Heatmaps, he says, also have allowed him to see what sections are the most read on the page.

Although www.pass-port.com is not a site that engages in sales, Kuikman projects financial benefits from the use of ClickTale. The data gleaned from watching visitor movies, he explains, will save the company costly decision making time with the future redesign of their site as the evidence for the changes they need to make will be quite apparent from the footage. Robin Forde, marketing manager, says that the company intends to use ClickTale on the new site as well in order to monitor its navigability and usability.

ClickTale’s advantage, according to Kuikman, that it is “a qualitative kind of analysis which you don’t really get anywhere else. It’s a different perspective to see how those pages are browsed rather than that they are just places that people showed up on.”  He is also enthused by the surprises that ClickTale’s analytics reveal about the demographics of his viewers. Jokingly, he and Robin share that the higher the screen resolution of their users, the more tech savvy they seem to be. Passport, it seems, has derived all that they had bargained for as a result of using ClickTale– and a little extra to boot!