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Top 5 User Engagement KPIs to Measure
Content. The heart of all of our marketing efforts. But what’s the point in good content if it’s not getting any engagement?
Unfortunately, there isn’t one.
So how do you make it happen? You have to understand what it is that makes your audience interact with your brand. This could be a retweet or a full blown purchase, anything that gets your customers engaged.
But engagement is one of those buzzwords that flies around the marketing industry without anything actually knowing what it really means. If you don’t know what it means, how can you measure it?
That’s why we’ve put together some of the most important, and useful, user engagement metrics for you.
1. Page views
This is where it all starts. Your page views, otherwise known as sessions, users or visitors are what prove you’re getting traffic to your website.
Page views are quite literally the views you’re getting on each page of your site. They might be the most simple of the user engagement KPIs, but that doesn’t mean they’re less important.
From here, page views can help you understand how regularly your website is being visited. The higher the number of views, the bigger the levels of interest surrounding your site and its content.
A higher number can also suggest you’re pretty good at SEO. If you need help with your SEO practices, have a look at our actionable SEO tips.
Other than showing who’s visited your website, page views also indicate changes to your site or marketing are working correctly. Result!
Analytics tools like CANDDi are also handy for measuring engagement. Our website visitor tracking lets you know who’s looked at your site, what pages in particular, and for how long.
2. Pages per session
Getting one page view is great, but getting a couple more, well… jackpot.
Obviously, the more pages looked at in one session the better. A high pages per session count indicates that your visitors are hooked! They’re keen to have a nosey around and are actively visiting more than one page.
Noseying = engagement. You heard it here first.
But don’t get too excited. If you’re getting a lot of pages per session, but they’re not spending long browsing, it’s not good news.
A visitor that’s viewing loads of pages but not spending much time on them is a clue they’re page hopping.
This might be because you’ve lost their interest and they can’t find what they’re looking for.
To combat this, you want to provide a clear set of steps that guides visitors through your site. Your content should match this journey and voila, a happy browsing experience.
3. Time spent browsing
So once you know your content is getting views, you want to know how long each view is lasting. Did your prospect click through by accident, or did they actually read your blog?
Here’s two ways of looking at it:
Micro view: time spent on a specific page
Macro view: the average time spent on your site as a whole
The key thing about this metric is that it shows a truer level of interest.
For example, an average viewer reads around 250 words each minute when browsing. As a result, Medium suggests your optimal blog post should be approx. 2,100 words long.
You want to set a goal for what you think is enough time for your audience to be spending on your site. Check you’re on track by referring to your past data, and keep coming back to review your metrics.
Google Analytics can help with this. Their ‘Acquisition’ tab tracks your visitors page activities using timestamps from when the first activity occurred to the last. This means every new page load and activity e.g. clicks is monitored per visitor.
If you need help optimizing your content for better website visitor sessions, make sure it’s relevant and of value.
You then need a clear call to action once they’ve finished browsing, and make it easy for them to navigate around your site.
If there’s too many obstacles, they’ll jump ship straight away. Wouldn’t you?
4. Bounce rate
The bounce rate is the nemesis of the time spent. If your bounce rate is increasing, then your average session duration is decreasing.
Measuring your bounce rate is important because it identifies which of your are NOT engaging with your site.
If you’re getting good page views but also getting high bounce rates, there’s something going wrong.
So what can you do about it? The key thing to measure are the pages with high engagements, but also high bounce rates.
Once you’ve identified them, compare them with the pages that have high engagements but low bounce rates.
Analyse the content/ design of your page and any other off-page tactics you’ve got in play. This might be ads, SEO, PPC, etc. You can then replicate this strategy on your low performing pages. Sneaky, but simple.
5. Conversion rate
The grande finale. All of your user engagement KPIs are leading up to this bad boy.
A conversion rate can be measured in a number of ways, it’s however you best see your customer onboarding with your business.
Maybe it’s a purchase, signing up to a webinar or a simple hello in your live chat. Whatever it is, it’s solid proof of engagement.
Because of this, you want to keep a close eye on it. Many of the platforms you’re already using will have their own built in analytics tools. This includes your social media accounts, buffer and Google Adwords.
Although these make it easier, you can’t rest on your laurels. You want to maximse your conversion rate, and you can do so by measuring Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
CRO starts by analysing your existing data and making tiny adjustments - also known as A/B testing.
Once you know what works, you can keep playing with it and the world is your conversion oyster!
Conclusion
Ultimately, your website is the face of your business, so the engagement it gets is a key indicator of its success.
This is especially important in a time when everything is available within the click of a button. If you don’t act accordingly, you’re going to miss out!
The end goal is of course conversion, which directly links customer engagement to the profitability of your business. Why? Because engaged visitors are more likely to spend money, come back for more and share their experience with other customers.
But before you dive in and decide on the user engagement metrics you want to measure, you have to decide which ones are the most commercially viable for your business.
Hopefully our 5 are a good place to start!
