Improve Content Performance with Dwell Engagement Score

Anyone doing advanced SEO and content marketing has been paying attention to Dwell or Dwell Time as an indicator of content quality for some time now. If you don’t know what it is, Dwell is the amount of time a user spends on a page before returning to the SERP.

Why Pay Attention to Dwell Time

Google Analytics already provides Average Engagement Time and Engagement so why would you need to pay attention to Dwell Time? Dwell is frequently used as a content satisfaction proxy – short Dwell time indicates that the user didn’t find the content useful while long Dwell time points to higher user satisfaction.

It differs from those other metrics in a variety of ways. Average Engagement Time measures the amount of time users interact with a page – it only counts when a user is interacting such as scrolling, clicking, etc. Engagement rate is the percent of sessions that are classified as engaged with an engaged session counting as someone who is on site longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion, has multiple pageviews, etc. Dwell lives in the middle of these metrics providing a more comprehensive view of how a user might consume content without interacting with the site.

What is Dwell Engagement Score

Google Analytics 4 doesn’t have a metric called Dwell. Google Search Console has no idea what Dwell Time is. Hot Jar, Clarity, and other UX tools wouldn’t know where to start with Dwell.

How can we measure Dwell so content and SEO can be improved? Robert Drumm has created a new metric, Dwell Engagement Score, to help measure Dwell in a way that all tools on the market have ignored. Invented by, and exclusive to RobertDrumm.com, Dwell Engagement Score can quickly find your highest performing pages which you can use to improve your lowest performing pages.

It uses a combination of average engagement time and engagement rate to come up with a single score which you can then rank pages against each other finding your best and worst Dwell pages. There are two versions of Dwell Engagement Score –

• Regular Dwell Engagement Score (rDES): Combines average engagement time and engagement rate to provide a quick reference for user engagement, summarizing how effectively a page holds users’ attention
• Normalized Dwell Engagement Score (nDES): Normalizes rDES values across a set of pages to create a consistent 0-100 scale. This makes it easier to compare the performance of different page types

How to Calculate Regular Dwell Engagement Score

Regular Dwell Engagement Score (rDES) is a fairly simple calculation using average engagement time (in seconds) and engagement rate (in a whole number). The formula looks like this –

• Average Engagement Time (in seconds) / (1 + Engagement Rate)

Here’s an example –

In the example, rDES is 55.90. Is that good or bad? We’ll discuss that in a bit, but for now, let’s talk about normalization.

How To Calculate Normalized Dwell Engagement Score

Normalizing your Dwell Engagement Score is optional but very helpful when comparing pages on the same website. It allows you to see very clearly which types of pages are doing better than others without any cloudiness that can be injected into some data. Here’s how to calculate a Normalized Dwell Engagement Score (nDES)

• First, calculate your rDES for a group of pages as shown above. For example, you have scores of 35, 50, 80, 20, 40, 65
• Use nDES formula: (Score – Min Score) / (Max Score – Min Score) x 100
• Let’s Calculate It –
  • Min Score – 20; Max Score – 80
  • For the 35-score page, it would normalize to this –
    • (35 – 20) / (80 – 20) x 100 = 25
  • For all scores –
    • 35 = 25.0
    • 50 = 50.0
    • 80 = 100.0
    • 20 = 0.0
    • 40 = 33.33
    • 65 = 75.0

You might ask yourself why you would want to normalize when they’re in the same order.

Normalization does a few things –

• Easier to compare and an intuitive scale – 0 to 100 are like percentages so seeing a page at 25 vs. 100 is much easier to interpret than an rDES number of 35 and 80
• Standardization – once you start working with large data sets of rDES numbers, you may have scores at 175 and scores at 15. It’s difficult to compare pages with such a discrepancy so switching to nDES will allow you to see degree of differences much easier
• Outliers and Patterns – again, with rDES, you might have numbers all over the place but if you run an nDES analysis, and see 10 pages grouped 60-90 and two pages 15-25, you know those two pages are way outside the norm
• Normalizing Metrics – Bounce rate and exit rate are 0-100 so getting a normalized Dwell Engagement Score allows you to combine these metrics in a more meaningful way

What to do with Dwell Engagement Score

Now that we’ve done all this work what can we do with Dwell Engagement Score? Here’s a list of five items that would be very helpful but there are numerous ways the scores can help you improve content, SEO, UX, and other areas of design and marketing.

1. Find High and Underperforming Pages
   • nDES allows you to easily identify the best pages, those with a score of 80+, helping you drive engagement on new pages, and fixing any low performing pages (those with an nDES under 50)
2. Benchmarking and Engagement Goals
   • Create KPI’s for your content and UX/CX teams. You might find that shelf pages have an nDES score of 60 and you want to get that to 75. Blog posts might have an nDES of 45 and you want to shoot for a 60. When you improve a page from 45 to 70, you can quickly see the improvement and replicate that on other pages
3. Content Strategy Optimization
   • A content audit will uncover high scoring pages which you can use as a template for all future content. You can also use high scoring pages for content repurposing such as taking an 85 scoring blog and turning it into a video or infographic
4. UX and Conversion Rate Optimization
   • Group your pages into types and compare – e.g. product pages, shelf pages, or even product or content types. Test different UX elements that work in one group on a different group to see if you can get a lift. There are numerous A/B tests you can run across sub 50 nDES pages that you might find on an 80+ nDES page
5. Resource Allocation

• • Google loves pages that keep users engaged – we know they use Chrome data in the algorithm so use Dwell Score to your advantage. Focus on high potential pages and promote them more heavily to see if their rankings improve.

Dwell Engagement Score whether regular or normalized is new to SEO, Content Marketing, and UX so opportunities for its use are endless. Contact Robert Drumm if you have questions about how to calculate rDES, nDES, or want to discuss options for using Dwell Score in your SEO, website, or other digital marketing channels.