Should I care about average engagement time?

Google Analytics throws lots of metrics your way. If you're looking at how engaged your users are, it's easy to latch on to average engagement time per active user. It's the first number in the Engagement Section, after all.

Is it a good metric to track? Or is it prone to distortion?

Imagine you have a content website - like BBC News - and you provide stories for your audience to consume. If your content is good they will read more, would you agree? And if it's boring, or confusing, or broken, they will spend less time there, right? 

I think that's a good general rule. 

I know of a content website that has an average engagement time per active user of 1 minute 29 seconds. When I say a 'content website', I mean a website where the content is the reason it exists.

Let me give a caveat. Imagine your aim is for someone to understand your message. That might be an aim for a public service website, like the NHS portal in the UK, or a local council website like Liverpool City Council. For those websites, the goal is often to help a user to understand something. 

A long-winded, badly-worded page would hinder this goal. Confusingly, a long-winded, badly-worded page might also have a larger average engagement time. 

Imagine you're working for a cancer charity and you're trying to raise money. You run an email marketing campaign, and the emails lead supporters through to a particular website page to give money. But imagine that, to save money, the donation form is actually stored on a different website such as the Charities Aid Foundation.

In this context success is probably measured in the number and quantity of donations. That money helps the charity invest in cancer research, and provide support to those affected.

These would be the steps in the user journey:

1. Email
2. Information page on website
3. Donation page on CAF Bank website
4. Receipt and thank you page on CAF Bank website
5. Thank you email

Now, here's the contradiction. If more people make a donation, more people will leave the charity's website. And that will bring the average engagement time down. Darn.

I've seen an extreme example of a website like this where the average engagement time is 36 seconds. The owners weren't worried about that - they had data that their users were achieving their aims, it's just the end point of those aims was a separate website.

Cross-domain tracking can help in that sort of situation. Sadly, in the example of above it's not possible. The owners don't have enough access to the back-end of the fulfilment website.

My advice is to think about the purpose of your website or app. Think about the kind of pages that form it. And then decide whether average engagement time fits for you.

And remember that a site-wide average metric, like this, may take a huge amount of effort to shift. Perhaps it would make more sense to focus on this average engagement time for a single page instead. You can find that under Reports -> Engagement -> Pages and screens.

About me

I'm James, a certified Google Analytics consultant in the UK.

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