Inside the Metrics – Average Time Spent on Site

The metric For our inaugural post in this series, we look at average time spent on site which is the average length of time a member spends within your community. You can think of this sort of metric as one of many other basic indications of participation and engagement within a community.What We Report On community dashboards, this metric shows up as the average length of time community members who visit your site stay around at any given time. Depending on the purpose of the visit and the actions being taken, this could be less than a few minutes, or longer than 10 minutes.The OpportunityThis metric can tell us if the content and conversations are appealing to members. It can, to some extent, provide insight into whether a topic resonates with users or if the content is helping them solve a problem. It can also help us see if there are opportunities to improve the user experience. But this metric alone is not an effective way to see deeper into that sort of information.This metric could very well be telling us whether content or conversations are resonating with our community members, but it doesn’t tell us the level to which that is happening. It doesn’t provide us information on whether a member spent an average of 8 minutes trying to find something before giving up or whether they spent an average of 8 minutes reading articles that helped them build upon their existing knowledge of a topic. This metric highlights some form of engagement at a high level, but it doesn’t provide information that effectively measures the behaviors we want to see exhibited within the community.How do we, then, find out more meaningful information from this metric? You have to be willing to ask a few questions and spend a little time digging.One way to do this is by comparing this information with your bounce rates and identifying where members are bowing out. Follow the journey from the time someone enters your site to the time they leave. Were they using the search functionality and abandoned while trying to find something they were looking for? Or better yet, did they leave after possibly finding the resource they came to find? Were they registering for an online event or reading an article before they logged out? On average, how long did it take them to perform these actions before leaving the site? Visibility into this type of information gives you a better understanding of the behavior of your members and can help you possibly identify a flaw in your site navigation or placement of content. On the other hand, it can also help you identify what members are coming into your community for, allowing you to discover ways to better serve them. These insights may not be incredibly apparent, but it’s definitely something to look at.To get a bit more granular with this data, you can marry this information with individual page views. If your community analytics show you the pages that are visited most often, it will help you follow the breadcrumbs users leave when visiting your community. Again, this provides community managers greater insight into the content members are consuming, the conversations they are contributing to, and how they are choosing to spend their time while visiting the community.  This will allow you to paint a more comprehensive picture around what members need and how to deliver it to them.Digging into this information helps you lend to the overall customer story your association is concerned with when it comes to how members are engaging. It allows you to see the behaviors that members exhibit when they choose to spend time in the community and can show, in some level of detail, what members are finding value in.On their own, raw metrics rarely provide a complete picture of what is going on once you report out on them. Granted, sometimes the number of content items produced is just that, but if you want a more comprehensive look at community value you must be willing to look a bit deeper. And if the metric isn’t giving you any information that will provide you with a tangible take away, don’t be afraid to question whether it makes sense to continue reporting on it. Sometimes it doesn’t.Inside the Metrics is a monthly post that focuses on common metrics that online community managers report against and takes a closer look at how more meaningful data can be pulled from them.