User session duration is a critical metric for assessing the effectiveness and appeal of a website, and significantly affects the ad monetization potential of the site. It serves as a key indicator of user engagement, reflecting the amount of time visitors spend navigating and interacting with the site. A longer session duration generally suggests that users find the content compelling, relevant, and the overall user experience satisfactory. This metric goes beyond just pageviews, offering a more holistic view of how effectively a website captures and retains the attention of its audience. Understanding and optimizing user session duration is crucial for your site’s success and overall ad revenue.
Long user session duration signifies a positive user experience, contributing to increased brand loyalty, higher conversion rates, and overall online success.
In the past few years we see a decreasing trend of user session duration in the AdTech industry.
User sessions are impacted by a few factors, such as Website content, User experience, Competition, Technical issues, Industry trends, and more.
Content Relevancy significantly affects session durations- If the content on the website is not meeting the expectations of visitors or is not relevant to their needs, they may leave the site quickly, resulting in shorter session durations.
Another factor we need to keep in mind when understanding user session duration are the changes in audience behavior. Shifts in user behavior, preferences, or trends can influence how long users stay on a website. For example, changes in content consumption habits or the rise of new platforms may impact session durations.
Over time, users have developed a preference for content that is quick and easily digestible, potentially leading to shorter session durations on sites that do not align with these preferences. The transformation brought about by social media in content discovery and consumption has reshaped traditional search behavior. Users now often discover and consume content directly within their social media feeds, reducing the necessity to visit specific websites for information. Social media platforms themselves actively seek to retain users within their ecosystems, creating a dynamic where users may spend extended periods on these platforms rather than navigating to external websites. This trend contributes to shorter session durations on destination sites as users may be less inclined to explore beyond the initial link.
A leading strategy in dealing with this issue is embedding social media into websites.
While this strategic approach has positive impacts on user engagement, it comes with challenges: It can strain publishers’ resources, requiring the creation of in-content articles to match social posts, which demands time and effort. Technical limitations, such as post sizes, necessitate ongoing adjustments to articles on the site. Also, embedding posts directly on the site consumes a significant portion of the site’s inventory without ad monetisation, posing a risk of users leaving the site and thereby shortening their session duration.
Recognizing the importance of extending user session durations and increasing user engagement, along with the changes of online users behavior, Carambola offers a comprehensive solution, addressing these challenges.
Our new AI-based contextual units seamlessly connect your audience to trending content on popular social platforms, enriching your site’s content and enhancing the user experience while presenting users with targeted ads. Native advertisement with social media embedded- a great way to monetise your website.
When using our contextual unit, you can be sure your users see social content that fits perfectly with the article they’re in.
Whether you want to embed twitter feed on your site, or other social media content, you can let our AI-scanning system choose the most relevant posts or choose them manually, basing on specific hashtags or social accounts
We know how important it is for you to keep users on your site extending their session duration, so we made sure that when they click on a social post within our contextual units, they remain on your site.
The Carambola AI-based contextual unit give you a 34% increase in session duration, 29% increase in page views per visit, and up to 25% increase of revenue.
Longer user sessions, better engagement, better site monetization!
Join us, grow your revenue 🙂