Dwell time… you’ve likely heard the term floating around once or twice, but what actually is it? And most importantly, how concerned do you need to be about it?  

What is Dwell Time? 

The definition for dwell time can often be confused with other metrics, such as average session duration, average time on page and bounce rate. However, dwell time should not be used interchangeably with any of these.  

Dwell time is the amount of time a user spends between clicking on a search result and returning to search results.  

Dwell time is an excellent indication of the worth of your page to a reader, because the more time they spend on your page, the more useful your content is to them. Pages that have a short dwell time are more likely to be unhelpful to the user. Here is an example of what different dwell times could indicate:  

Dwell time vs bounce rate 

Many people wrongly confuse dwell time with bounce rate because of a common misunderstanding of what bounce rate really is.  

The bounce rate represents the percentage of your site sessions during which a user only looked at one single page.  

The bounce rate does not show the percentage of viewers who have left one page and moved on to another one within your site. Rather, it shows the percentage of viewers who have left the website to return to search results after viewing just one page. 

It’s worth remembering that a high bounce rate does not necessarily mean that your content was unhelpful. Even if the user has left the page and returned to the search results, they may have done so after spending time absorbing the content (this would be referred to as a ‘soft bounce’). This explains why bounce rate is not the same as dwell time. 

Dwell time as a measure helps you to distinguish between hard and soft bounces, and to measure page performance in that percentage of users who bounce. 

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