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Do Shorter Blog Posts get More Time on Page then Longer Blog Posts
Feb 6, 2023
Do longer articles receive more time on page than shorter articles? That is a good question and I had to dig into my analytics to find the answer! There are two thought processes with this. The first thought is that longer articles might scare some readers away and cause less view time, while shorter articles encourage a reader to finish reading it to the end. Or on the contrary, longer articles simply take longer to read, while shorter articles can easily be skimmed. Which one is true? Well, the numbers don't let. Watch the video for the results!
View Video Transcript
0:00
so in this video we're going to do some comparisons on shorter blog posts compared to longer blog
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posts which ones get more time on page so which one do people spend more time reading so you would
0:16
think that people would spend more time reading a long blog post rather than a short one however
0:23
it's possible that readers will see a long blog blog post and get scared away and not read it at
0:30
all whereas a short blog post they'll be like okay I can handle that and then they'll read the whole
0:36
thing so in order to do this the first thing I need is a plugin that will let me figure out how
0:46
long each of my articles are so I can find the 10 shortest blog posts and my
0:51
10 longest blog posts I'm just gonna look for a word counter see
1:07
how many words I might need to do a Google search Oh count the words on your wordpress site instantly
1:22
I think this is what I want Check it out
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You need to calculate your words before you can start using the plugin
1:53
Interesting so I've written 200,000 words my average post is 1800 okay here's my top
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posts I have to blur these out and this so 3,000 words 3,000 holy cow I didn't
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even realize I wrote ones that long so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 so there's my top 10
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but how am I gonna find my bottom okay here it is okay and here's my so 1 2 3
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four five six seven eight nine ten cool so most of this screen is gonna have to
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be blurred out obviously but I found my smallest articles and I have my largest
2:55
article so now I'm gonna go to the ytics and I'm show you what I'm gonna
2:59
do the behavior site content all pages I'm gonna switch this to organic because
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that's really all I care about so that's what it's on now all I need now I'm gonna
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go so you can take whatever page you want here and you can press this a plot
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row and it will show you each article so I would change this to average time on page now you can see each articles time on page so what I need to do I need to put all of my I need to put all of my large articles on and see what this looks like
3:36
and then I need to put all of my small articles and see what this looks like and compare the two
3:44
compare the two graphs and see if there's any correlation so I'm going to go ahead
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and get it all set up and then come back once I've done that so I finally finished plotting it all down you can only do the top six not the top ten
4:02
so the blue is the average for all of my pages and then the colored colored marks are
4:10
the individual pages so you'll see for the most part the the less words on the content are actually
4:21
less than the average of the page of the blog every now and then see there it shoots up way up
4:28
past it right there but for the most part it's actually less now we'll take a look at the other
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side of the coin so next will be pages with a lot of words so these were all like a thousand words
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to eleven hundred words now these will all be three thousand twenty five hundred and two thousand
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word articles and so now you see for a lot of these articles the time on page is actually a lot than the average time you see as time goes on it actually getting more and more more time on page
5:15
so we'll compare so as you can see this graph here is the short content and then
5:26
this graph here is the long content so so taking a look at this it seems like longer articles
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get more time on page than shorter articles but one thing to consider is my longer articles are
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actually getting a lot more views than my short articles so some of these are actually getting
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a thousand views per month whereas these are getting like some of them are only getting like
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50 100 views per month so it might be skewing the results a little bit i'm not sure but i mean
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a lot of these articles are way past the average whereas the short articles are way under the
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average so i'm gonna say that the longer articles are the more more page time they get which makes
6:21
sense if you have a longer article it's going to take people longer to read them as long as you
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have them formatted in a way that's not going to scare people away those are my results on that let
6:31
me know in the comments what you think and you should do the same for your on your ytics
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and see if you get the same results and let me know in the comments down below
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