How to get visitors to spend longer on your web page

I’m going to start by giving you a clue to the title. We’re a video production company and we’re putting aside time to write this blog, so that should suffice.

And if it doesn’t, the answer is of course that video content will increase the time visitors spend on your website.

You may even be reading this and thinking, ‘well that’s nothing new’. And you’d be right, those who know about video have been saying it for years. But it’s always good to back up an assertion with some fresh facts based on hard data and that’s exactly what those innovative folk at video hosting company Wistia have done.

They have reviewed the top 100 highest-trafficked pages on their website over a three year-period to July 2016 and looked at time on page.

What they found is people spend more time on pages with video. Much more time. 2.6x more time to be precise.

In Wistia’s case this was 7 minutes and 21 seconds for pages with video, and 2 minutes and 48 seconds for pages with no video.

Time-on-page is a great barometer as to how people are engaging with your web content. It’s all very well getting 1 million page views, but far less good if each of those page views are 5 seconds long.

Wistia’s research also showed that of the pages with video, those with multiple videos were the best at keeping people on a page.

However, video length had less of a bearing than one might think on the length of time someone spends on a webpage.

The page with the longest average dwell time on Wistia’s website had three videos, but collectively they were only just more than a minute in length.

This suggests it might be easier to keep someone’s attention by creating several videos on the same topic, rather than one long video.

Especially if the videos are building up knowledge about a certain topic or piece of research.

So, if you want people to stick around once they’ve arrived on your website, to learn more about your organisation and follow your calls-to-action then the answer is to increase the amount of video content on your pages.