Visit duration

Visit duration is the average amount of time visitors spend on your site during a single visit.

How it is calculated

MetriXs calculates visit duration as the time between the first pageview and the last event in a visit:

Visit duration = timestamp of last event − timestamp of first pageview

The last event can be a pageview or a custom event.

The last-page problem

Like all analytics tools that don’t use persistent tracking, MetriXs cannot know how long a visitor spent on the last page of their visit. There is no “page close” event.

This means:

• A visit with 1 pageview always has a duration of 0 seconds (only one timestamp available)
• A visit with 2 pageviews records duration as the time between page 1 and page 2

Example

Time	Event	Duration so far
09:00:00	Pageview: /	0s
09:02:30	Pageview: /pricing	2m 30s
09:05:00	Pageview: /register	5m 0s
(visitor leaves)	—	Duration = 5m 0s

Time spent reading /register before leaving is not counted.

Average visit duration on the dashboard

The dashboard shows the average visit duration across all visits in the selected period. Visits with only one pageview (duration = 0s) are included in this average, which will pull the average down on sites with high bounce rates.

Improving measurement accuracy

Because duration is last event − first pageview, the last-page problem only bites when a visitor reads a page and leaves without firing any further event. You can recover that lost time by firing custom events during real interactions — each one becomes a new “last event” timestamp and pushes the measured duration forward.

For example, on a long article you can fire a scroll_to_bottom event when the reader reaches the end:

window.addEventListener('scroll', () => {
  if (window.scrollY + window.innerHeight >= document.body.scrollHeight - 50) {
    metrixs('scroll_to_bottom', { props: { article: 'gdpr' }, interactive: false })
  }
}, { once: true })

Time	Event	Duration so far
09:00:00	Pageview: /blog/gdpr	0s
09:04:30	Custom event: scroll_to_bottom	4m 30s
(visitor leaves)	—	Duration = 4m 30s (was 0s without the event)

Useful signals to fire: scroll-to-bottom, video play/pause, form focus, expand accordion, reach comments.

A note on the interactive: false flag: by default, a custom event counts as a real interaction and will lower bounce rate (a single-pageview visit with a custom event is no longer a “bounce”). If the event is a passive reading signal (scroll, visibility) rather than a genuine engagement, pass interactive: false so it extends duration without distorting bounce rate. See Custom events for the full API.