View Duration is a measure of how long visitors spend on a specific page, on average. You’ll see the View Duration appear in the data table of the Pages menu.
View Duration is measured in a similar way as Session Duration. We take the time that visitors land on a page and subtract it from the previous page. For instance, the following session would tell us that the visitor spent two minutes on Page 1:
- Page 1: 1:25pm
- Page 2: 1:27pm
For this session, we would simply ignore Page 2. Likewise, when visitors only view one page, we don’t calculate View Duration.
This is the same way that Google Analytics calculates Time on Page, but with one critical difference. We omit unknown values from our calculation, while Google counts them as zero. This has the effect of lowering the View Duration towards zero, especially if you have lots of one-page sessions. For this reason, you will see that the View Duration reported in Independent Analytics is higher than the Time on Page metric in Google Analytics.