Shopping Session Length Metric

What is Shopping Session Length?

The Shopping Session Length KPI measures the average time a visitor actively spends on your e-commerce site during a single visit. It’s a key indicator of customer engagement, telling you how captivating your products and user experience are. A longer session can often correlate with higher purchase intent and brand interest.

This metric helps you understand user behavior. Are visitors quickly finding what they need, or are they leaving in frustration? By tracking session length, store owners and marketing managers can identify opportunities to improve site navigation, product discovery, and content, ultimately boosting conversions.

How do you calculate Shopping Session Length?

To calculate the average shopping session length, you sum the duration of all individual user sessions and divide that by the total number of sessions.

Formula: (Length of customer session A + Length of session B + ... + Length of session N) / Total number of sessions

What is a good Shopping Session Length?

What qualifies as a "good" session length varies significantly based on your industry, traffic source, and the type of products you sell. A visitor looking for a specific, low-cost item might have a very short, efficient session, which is a positive outcome. Conversely, a customer Browse high-end, considered purchases might spend much longer.

As a general benchmark, an average session length of 15-20 minutes is often considered a strong target for many e-commerce stores. However, instead of focusing on a universal number, it’s more effective to track your own trends over time. An increasing average session length typically signals that your site improvements are successfully capturing visitor interest.

How to improve Shopping Session Length

Boosting session duration is about creating an engaging and seamless shopping experience. Here are a few strategies:

• Enhance Product Discovery: Implement high-quality search functionality and intuitive product categories.
• Use High-Quality Visuals: Showcase your products with compelling images and videos.
• Write Compelling Descriptions: Go beyond specs to tell a story about your product and its benefits.
• Recommend Related Products: Display "You might also like" or "Frequently bought together" sections to encourage further Browse.
• Create Valuable Content: Integrate blog posts, buying guides, or lookbooks that keep users on your site longer.

How to track Shopping Session Length

Monitoring Shopping Session Length is straightforward with the right tools. While you can pull this data directly from platforms like Google Analytics or Shopify, it's often isolated from other critical business metrics.

To see the complete picture, you can use a dashboarding tool like Klips. By creating a centralized dashboard, you can automatically track your Shopping Session Length alongside other vital e-commerce KPIs such as Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, and Cart Abandonment Rate.

This integrated view helps you connect the dots. You can see how a marketing campaign impacts not just traffic, but also the quality and duration of that traffic. With Klips, you can connect directly to your data sources, build customised visualisations, and share real-time insights with your team, ensuring everyone is aligned and focused on driving performance.

Ready to see this KPI in action? Explore our list of e-commerce metrics and KPIs to build a comprehensive dashboard for your business.