How to use duration in the Visitors’ Table

In this help doc, learn more about duration and how to view it within the Visitors’ Table. 

What is duration? 

Duration refers to the length of time a visitor spends actively engaging with a website during a single visit. It begins when the visitor arrives on a website and begins to engage with the elements by scrolling, moving, clicking, etc. thus beginning their session.  The duration of a session ends when one of these conditions is met:

  • The user leaves your website
  • The user closes the browser tab or window
  • The user becomes inactive for more than 15 minutes 

How to view duration within the Visitor’s Table

The duration of a session is valuable in identifying engagement and behavior among the most and least engaged visitors on your website. From Visitors, there are three ways to view session duration within the Visitors’ Table: Added as a column, used to filter Session Recording or selected as a segment for the Visitors’ Table. 

Visitors’ Table Column

As a column with the Visitors’ Table, you can add it to your columns and reposition them as needed using the column selector button located to the far right of the Visitor’s Table header.Once added, this column will display the session duration in seconds (e.g., 7s) or a combination of minutes and seconds (1m42s). This information in the Visitors’ Table updates when the user exits the web page they are currently on. 

For users who are on the first page of their visit, you may see the duration listed as hyphen (-)  instead. This duration will be updated within the Visitors’ Table when the user moves to a different page or leaves the website. The hyphen will also display for users who bounced quickly.

Visitors’ Table Filter

As a filter for the Visitor’s Table, duration will let you select from predetermined time frames such as 0-5 minutes or select from a custom range. This custom range is defined in minutes.  

You can find the filter button located in the upper right hand above the Visitors’ Table.  Combine the filter with other filters, such as visited page, pages per session or UTM parameters to drill down further.

Visitors’ Table Optimizable Segments

If you use the Optimizable Segment for Engaged Visitors, this will automatically add filters for 3+ pages per session and a duration that is greater than  or equal to 1 minute as shown below. 

You can find this in the drop-down located above the “Name” column in the Visitors’ Table header.