What Is Dwell Time?

Date First Published: 13th October 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what dwell time is in this article.

Dwell time is the period of time that a user spends on a webpage after clicking through a link on a search engine result before returning back to the search engine results page. Knowing the dwell time is beneficial for webmasters as it can provide them with an overview of how useful their content is to visitors and measure engagement. The average dwell time is between 2-4 minutes, which is the amount of time it usually takes to explore a website and read a good amount of text. The term 'dwell time' was invented by Duane Forrester, a former Senior Project Manager at Bing in his 2011 blog post.

A longer dwell time means that the visitor has spent longer on the page after clicking on the search engine result, whilst a shorter dwell time means that they only spent a short period of time on the page before returning to the SERP. A shorter dwell time does not always mean that a webpage is unhelpful to users or that there are issues with the website. For example, on a dictionary website with a short definition of a word, they might have just spent a short period of time looking at the definition of the word. On a longer page, they might have just skimmed through the information they were looking for and not spent much time looking at the rest of the page. However, if one webpage constantly has a dwell time of a few seconds, that is a sign that something is wrong.

Difference Between Dwell Time, Bounce Rate, and Time Spent On Page

Dwell time is not the same as bounce rate or time spent on a page. Bounce rate is a measure of the percentage of visitors that leave after visiting one page. For example, if a visitor landed on a webpage by clicking on an external link located on another website and left the website without viewing any other pages, that would be considered a bounce. Visitors who bounce do not always come from the SERP. The time spent on a page is not the same as dwell time as it is simply the period of time that a visitor spends on a specific page. Dwell time only measures the duration between a user clicking through a link on a search engine result and returning back to the search engine results page.

How To Measure Dwell Time?

Dwell time can be measured with a web analytics service called Google Analytics. It can be measured by following these steps:

1. Log in to your Analytics account. If you don't have one, create one.
2. Click 'Behaviour'.
3. Click 'Site content'.
4. Click 'Landing pages'.
5. Click 'New segment' and select to only view 'Organic traffic'.
6. You can then view the metric under the 'Avg. session duration' section.

You will have to filter it to organic traffic in order to measure dwell time. Unfortunately, there is no official measurement that says 'dwell time' in Google Analytics because search engines never share that data.

Is Dwell Time A Ranking Factor?

There is no strong evidence to support the idea that search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yandex use dwell time as a ranking factor. Google, Bing, and Yandex have never officially stated that dwell time is a ranking factor. However, it is clear that search engines can measure dwell time because they can record the duration of time between a searcher clicking through the search result and them clicking the back button to return to the search results page. For example, if a searcher clicked through a search result at 10:00:15 am and they clicked the back button on their browser at 10:02:15 am, the dwell time would be 2 minutes and search engines can calculate the duration between those two times. Google will show related search queries below the search result in a 'people also search for' search box that the searcher has returned back from, as shown below, so Google can definitely tell if people have been clicking on a search result and then returning to the list of search results.

Like bounce rate and pogo sticking, dwell time is not a reliable metric to determine the quality of webpages. As stated above, a shorter dwell time does not always mean that a user was unhappy or that there were issues with the website. Users might have found what they were looking for, but only wanted to read a certain section of the page. Also, dwell time is very easy to manipulate. It would be easy for someone to manipulate the search engine results so that a specific search result gets moved down by them constantly clicking through the result and then clicking the back button on their browser after a few seconds if dwell time was a ranking factor.

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