Dwell Time

Dwell time, in advertising, is the duration an asset remains in front of the intended audience between first exposure and removal. The term originated in out-of-home advertising — bus shelters, transit posters, billboards — where the figure was used to argue that a poster seen for ninety seconds during a commute justified a different rate card than a six-second TV spot. Digital advertising borrowed and narrowed the term to mean the milliseconds a banner is on screen before the user scrolls past.

Door hangers sit at the extreme high end of the dwell-time spectrum. The carrier hangs the piece on the doorknob in the morning. The homeowner sees it for the first time when they return home that evening. It then remains on the knob — sometimes inside on a hallway table, sometimes pinned to the fridge — until the homeowner either calls the number, throws the piece out, or hangs it back on the door for a spouse to see. Internal carrier surveys put the median dwell time for a Calgary door hanger between 36 and 72 hours; outliers stay on a fridge or in a glove box for weeks.

That long tail matters because it decouples ad exposure from immediate purchase intent. A Google Ads click costs the contractor a fixed dollar amount whether or not the visitor was actually ready to buy. A door hanger costs the same per door regardless of whether the homeowner converts that night, the following weekend, or three months later when the next snowfall finally pushes them to act. Calgary snow-removal operators routinely report calls from door hangers dropped in November that converted in late January, after the third major storm.

Dwell time also explains a counterintuitive result in door-hanger A/B testing: a clean, simple design with a single offer and a phone number consistently beats a dense brochure-style hanger packed with services. The piece is going to sit in the home for days; the homeowner does not need every detail on first exposure, just a clear identifier and a way to act. The downstream phone call carries the rest.

The metric is sometimes confused with impressions or reach. Impressions count exposures; reach counts unique humans exposed; dwell time measures depth of each exposure. A digital banner can have a million impressions and effectively zero dwell time. A door hanger campaign in a single Calgary zone has roughly 4,000 reach and several days of dwell per piece — a structurally different advertising product even when the per-lead cost looks comparable on paper.

For attribution, long dwell time creates a measurement problem: a contractor who runs door hangers in May and Google Ads in July cannot cleanly attribute a July booking to one channel or the other. Most operators solve this by using a dedicated tracking phone number or a printed promo code on the hanger and treating any other inbound call as multi-touch attribution.