High-conversion websites maintain an average session duration of 3 minutes and 36 seconds. More useful than this broad average, however, is the benchmark for your specific industry, as it allows you to accurately assess the level of engagement of your website visitors.
Below, we share our marketing firm’s data on average session duration drawn from our work with 170 companies across more than 50 industries. Our data pool consists of ~23% B2C and ~77% B2B clients, all of which were actively investing in revenue growth.
Average Session Duration by Industry
| Industry | Average Session Duration | Industry | Average Session Duration |
| Addiction Treatment | 3:15 | Aerospace | 3:01 |
| Automotive | 2:41 | B2B SaaS | 4:26 |
| Biotech | 2:56 | Business Insurance | 4:06 |
| Construction | 3:18 | Contractor | 2:31 |
| Cybersecurity | 2:49 | eCommerce | 2:03 |
| Engineering | 3:00 | Energy Management | 2:53 |
| Environmental Services | 2:41 | Financial Services | 4:56 |
| Fintech | 3:28 | Healthcare | 2:58 |
| Heavy Equipment | 2:53 | Higher Education | 2:25 |
| Home Builders | 3:11 | Hotels & Resorts | 2:35 |
| HVAC | 2:56 | Industrial IOT | 3:17 |
| IT & Managed Services | 4:16 | Legal Services | 3:07 |
| Manufacturing | 3:37 | Oil & Gas | 4:13 |
| PCB Design & Manufacturing | 4:18 | Pharmaceutical | 3:47 |
| Real Estate | 3:52 | Security | 3:19 |
| Software Development | 2:38 | Solar | 2:56 |
| Staffing & Recruiting | 3:48 | Transportation & Logistics | 3:11 |
Typically, marketers aim to improve session duration; but that is not an inherently valuable goal so long as you’re hovering within ~20% of the benchmark for your industry. Instead, conversion rate should be the measure of a campaign’s success.
If, however, your website’s average session duration is substantively below its industry benchmark, below are strategies for improving it.
Improving Average Session Duration
The most common cause of low average session duration is a poor match between the content on the page and the visitor’s expectation. The majority of new traffic comes from Google, via PPC or SEO, so the visitor’s expectation can usually be gleaned through the keyword they searched.
The proper way to address the expectation behind the keyword search is to create content that addresses search intent. There are two components to doing so – Content Strategy and Content Production, outlined below.
| Content Strategy | Content Production |
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Content strategy refers to everything undertaken before a writer sets down to write a piece. This includes researching keyword targets, creating audience personas, and determining the ideal page type (blog post, landing page, case study, white paper, or something else) that your visitors want to see.
Content production refers to creating a web page that considers brand voice, reading level for each persona, and conversion optimization. Skimmability is a key tenet of successful content production. While it may seem counterintuitive to write content aimed to shorten session duration, doing so keeps visitors on the page the actual amount of time they wish to be there, as opposed to denser content that makes visitors feel bogged down and hence, bounce.
Getting Help Improving Your Average Session Duration
Improving your average session duration correlates directly with higher conversion rates; however, doing so requires a high level of preparation and marketing sophistication. For that reason, many businesses choose to outsource content creation to an experienced content marketing agency. If you would like to discuss a partnership, contact us here.
