User engagement metrics to focus on

Every business pursues optimal user engagement with its website. It’s simple math when you look at it. Investing in digital marketing solutions helps a brand attract traffic to its website. The website then appeals to the site visitors, turning them into leads that engage with the content and business. The sales reps take those leads and focus on converting them into paying customers. And your business expands and grows through constantly increasing revenue. Simple. And yet, there are a lot of grey areas in-between all these steps that you need to account for and fill out. In our previous article, we explored guidelines for boosting website user engagement. Today, we look at the next step of that process – gathering the data and measuring performance with user engagement metrics.

We start off by building our user engagement strategy

Every professional digital marketing company will tell you that personal satisfaction with the overall look of your website means little if it doesn’t match the interests of your target audiences. Your website and its overall design need to cater to what modern consumers are looking for. Because without the ability to engage with your users, you have no leg to stand on and your business is on a downward slope. Your first step needs to be to create a user engagement strategy. By visualizing the journey of customers from coming to your website to converting, you are able to plan out every step of that journey. So, here is a general idea of a game plan:

• Learn to understand your target audience. You can’t know how to engage people if you don’t understand what drives them to the products/services that your business offers.
• Give your website a logical structure. It’s important to map out your website and decide exactly how which section and page on it will serve your ability to engage with users and guide them.
• Maintain transparency with your CTAs and content. How can you count on users to engage with your website if they don’t understand how to do that? Give them roadsigns along the way to make it clear what actions you expect them to take.
• Constantly monitor and analyze data. The importance of understanding user engagement metrics comes from the rational goal to constantly improve your business and grow its revenue. This is why using current data to make informed decisions beneficial for user experience and engagement is such a vital task.

5 user engagement metrics you need to focus on

Page Views

As the most basic and common among user engagement metrics, page views are used to indicate the amount of traffic on a website. It helps a business understand just how often people visit its website. This metric is a great way to look at the results of your SEO strategizing and the overall traffic that you are getting from it.

In terms of user engagement, looking at page views is only one piece of the puzzle, as you still need other metrics to calculate just how many of those views end up engaging with your content. 

Time Spent on Page

When a website has a high average time spent on site, it leads to the conclusion that site visitors are spending time interacting with the content. It can also be a good sign that the website is user-friendly and offers the information that customers have been searching for. That is why it is an important user engagement metric that businesses need to keep an eye on. However, note that even though it is desirable to have users spend time on your website, it means little if they simply end up leaving your website without taking any action.

Bounce Rate

As we just mentioned, having site visitors leave your website after landing on it does not bode well for your user engagement statistics. Normally, any brand wants to lower its bounce rate as much as possible. The way you accomplish this is by taking the time to consult professional SEO companies and making sure that your website is up to par.

Return Visits

Exploring the different types of user intent has taught us that there are a lot of indecisive people out there. Those are site visitors that take the time to make an actual decision and opt for your products/services. Having a user return to your website multiple times bodes well in terms of user engagement metrics. It means that you have piqued their interest and that they are considering your solutions against others. But each time they return to your website, it brings you one step closer to a conversion.

Conversions

At the end of the day, the ultimate indicator of quality user engagement is whether or not you are able to convert visitors into customers through the design and content on your website. Making your website user-friendly and visually pleasing is a great first step toward achieving interaction with site visitors. Once you get to that point, you need to make sure that your website offers exactly what target audiences expect in order to constantly improve your conversion rate.

After understanding user engagement metrics, it’s time to start testing

Once you go through all the essential KPIs (and additional ones along the way), the next step is to analyze the data. You need to establish a clear image of just how good your user engagement with site visitors is and where there is room for improvement. Only by doing so will you be able to proceed with perfecting your website and the different elements on it.

Once you come up with a clear image of the current situation and brainstorm ways in which you can make improvements, it’s time to start running tests. Whether we are looking at flaws in design, copy, functionality, or other elements – you need to start making changes while constantly monitoring the user engagement metrics we mentioned here. Piece by piece, you will then be able to establish which elements should stay and which should be replaced with higher engagement alternatives.

Pro Tip: Use heatmaps

Another great way to learn how site visitors behave while on your website is through the use of heatmaps. That way, you can establish which parts of pages they spend the most time on and where their primary focus lies. At the same time, you can explore the colder parts of your pages that might be lacking in interactive or promotional elements.

Start improving your user engagement metrics today!

Monitoring these metrics brings you one step closer to optimizing them to perfection over time. With the years of experience and the resources that New York digital marketing agencies such as Digital Dot have to offer, you can establish constant growth for your brand through your website. Contact our team today and learn where you stand in terms of user engagement as well as how to improve!