Dwell time is how long an attendee stays in one place — a booth, a session room, a demo area — measured from arrival to departure. It's captured through badge scans, RFID readers, or app location data, and it separates people who genuinely engaged from people who just walked past.
Footfall tells you how many people passed; dwell time tells you how many stopped and stayed. That distinction changes how you read your show. A booth with 500 passers-by and a 20-second average dwell has a visibility problem or a pitch problem. A booth with 150 visitors averaging six minutes is doing real business. For organizers, dwell time is one of the fairest ways to evaluate floor plan decisions and content programming: long dwell in a session room means the talk landed, short dwell across a whole zone means the zone's theme isn't pulling its weight. It's also becoming part of the exhibitor ROI conversation — organizers who can report dwell alongside lead counts give exhibitors evidence, not anecdotes. The common mistake is comparing dwell times across unlike spaces. A grab-and-go info desk should have short dwell; a workshop should have long dwell. Set expectations per zone type, then compare year over year within the same zone. And remember the measurement has limits: someone parked at a booth's edge charging their phone counts the same as someone deep in a sales conversation. Use dwell as a signal, then confirm with meeting and lead data.
Direct answer
Dwell time is how long an attendee stays in one place — a booth, a session room, a demo area — measured from arrival to departure. It's captured through badge scans, RFID readers, or app location data, and it separates people who genuinely engaged from people who just walked past.
More terms
No related terms yet.