Along with numbers of visitors, their entry page to the blog, and whether the blog was accessed from a search engine or an external link, is the matter of how long a visitor stays at the blog.
Research conducted by my good friend Darren Rowse of the must read Pro Blogger has determined that the average visitor remains at a blog for all of 96 seconds.
That's an entire minute and a half.
That's not very long.
After a study of 350 blogs (or 25% of the total) at The Truth Laid Bear traffic ranking page, Darren discovered that blog visits end in literally a few short seconds.
While there are shortcomings in the data base, including the fact that the The Truth Laid Bear uses only publicly available visitor statistics from Site Metervisitor counter.
Other visitor counters, including the ones that I use, are not taken into account.
The average time of 96 seconds could possibly be a statistical error.
For example, if one person earns a $1 million per year, and the others earn $0, the average is $100,000 per year. As you can see, averages are very misleading. A better statistic is the median, where 50% of stays are longer than say 96 seconds, and 50% of stays are of shorter duration.
Since the major A-List bloggers probably have thousands of visitors that simply click over to check for updates, stay 10 seconds or less and then leave, those short stays would receive far more weight. One 10 minute stay on a low traffic blog would be overwhelmed in the “average length” calculation by quick clicks to the Top 100 blogs.
That said, the study teaches some very valuable lessons for bloggers.
The writer must engage the visitor immediately or risk that reader from clicking away to a more interesting blog. As Darren correctly says, get to the point of the post, and keep the message simple. If not, the visitor is long gone to the next blog or website.
The volume of work done by Darren Rowse, and the results found, are very interesting. The research Darren has undertaken is to be taken seriously by everyone who maintains a blog of any type.
Darren also offers some suggestions for further blogging research:
Questions and areas for further research
- Does blog design/loading time impact the the length of stay?
- Does blog topic impact the length of stay?
- Do bloggers from certain countries (with high local readership) have different lengths of stay?
- Does posting length have an impact?
- How are News Aggregators impacting length of stay?
- How do these figures compare with other websites that are not blogs?
Bloggers would be well advised to capture their visitors' attention immediately, or risk losing them possibly forever.
Short attention spans are the rule in the blogosphere.
Ignore them at your own peril.
