If you’ve recently made the switch from Universal Analytics (UA) to GA4, you may have noticed some new metrics included, particularly all things engagement. Average engagement time per session, engaged sessions, and engagement rate are great new measures of success.
Here’s how to define them and why they’re important to SEO and user experience.
Average Engagement Time Per Session
Average engagement time per session measures the “User Engagement Duration Per Session”, which is the length of time that your web page was in focus on a user’s screen. This can help you understand when users actively use your website vs. just have the page open in a tab but not displayed.
Average engagement time per session has replaced the old Average Session Duration from UA. That measured the duration of a user’s entire visit.
What Is A Good Average Engagement Time?
According to data from our own clients, we found average engagement times between 0:37-1:29, for an average of 57 seconds. We based this on engagement times per user, not per session.
Since we’ve not found any other data about this metric yet, we’ll conclude 57 seconds is an average Average Engagement Time on a website.
Updated based on Q1 2023 data on April 14, 2023.
Engaged Sessions
An engaged session is a session where the user did any one of the following:
- Stayed on the page for 10 seconds or longer
- Viewed more than 1 page
- Triggered a conversion event
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that were engaged sessions.
It essentially replaces bounce rate in GA4. You can still find bounce rate in GA4 by customizing your report view. Bounce rate is no longer listed by default.
More than just the inverse of a bounce rate, engagement rate gives a more holistic picture of user activity on your website.
A user who stayed on your page for minutes, downloaded something, and read the whole page would be considered a bounce. But based on that user’s actions, they were actually highly engaged. That’s why many are doing away with leaning on bounce rate to understand user interest, including Google.
What Is A Good Engagement Rate?
Rates above 63% for B2B and above 71% for B2C websites are considered good according to firstpagesage.com. This is based on a sampling of their own client data.
Orbit Media also provided the average engagement rate of their client sample of 65 websites. They stated the average GA4 engagement rate was 55%.
Looking at our own sampling of data, we found engagement rates between 36%-56% (with one outlier at an impressive 91%!), for an average of 53%.
Of course, engagement rates vary widely by traffic source. Expect a lower average engagement rate if much of your traffic is driven by paid ads.
Engagement Rate Is Key For SEO
Level of engagement is a key factor in Google’s search algorithm. Every year since 2016, Google has increased the weight of engagement. They reward the pages that users get most value from with higher rankings. That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on these metrics and work on improving any low-engagement pages.