Improving your website’s traffic is essential for building a wider audience for your company. Every successful company nowadays spends time and money measuring various engagement metrics to understand their customers’ behavior better and make their online content more meaningful.

Kissmetrics breaks down how to measure user engagement and which metrics give you the necessary information to improve your search rankings. 

How Do You Measure Engagement?

Product analytics and marketing tools measure user engagement by tracking their activities within your website and product. This software can track IP addresses to see how often users visit your website, which pages they view, how long they spend on each page, and many other aspects of their interaction.

What Is an Engagement Metric?

An engagement metric is any kind of measurement of user interaction with your company’s website or product. 

Which Engagement Metrics Will Help Improve My Search?

While there are many different engagement metrics to choose from, the following sections list the six most popular engagement metrics that add real value. 

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who ‘bounce’ away from your website after reading the contents of a single page. Essentially, this bounce rate measures people who read your blog and then decide not to check out more pages on your website or who arrive at your home page and realize that this wasn’t what they were looking for.  

How Do I Track Bounce Rate?

Your bounce rate can be tracked by analytics software. The equation for figuring out your bounce rate is to divide the total number of visitors who come to a page and then navigate away from your website without visiting another page by the total number of visits to your site.

How Can I Improve My Bounce Rate?

Visitors can bounce for several reasons, some of which you’ll have no control over. For example, if visitors are looking for a definition or explanation of a term, they will read the information you’ve presented and then move on. 

Visitors often bounce because your website didn’t provide exciting content that kept them wanting more. Or because the UI/UX was confusing or cumbersome. You can improve your bounce rate by ensuring that all pages are of high quality. 

Why Bounce Rate Isn’t Actionable

While it’s tempting to leave it at, “I need to decrease my bounce rate,” bounce rate by itself doesn’t give you detailed information. In order to utilize bounce rate, you’ll need information provided by other metrics. For instance, bounce rate doesn’t tell you why visitors are leaving. You would have to dig further into those reasons.

Pages Per Session

Pages per session are the number of different landing pages on your website that a single user visited during their session. 

How Do I Track Pages Per Session?

Your pages per session can be tracked by analytics software like Kissmetrics in a cohort report by entering the event parameters. 

The first event will be visiting a page on your website, and the second event will be visiting another page within your website. Your report will show the number of users who fulfilled both of those parameters, as well as the number of pages they viewed. 

How Can I Improve My Pages Per Session?

The best ways to improve pages per session is to make the content relevant and helpful to your audience and make your navigation clear. Conducting audience surveys and charting the user’s journey gives you clues about what type of content your audience would like to see and how it should be formatted. It’ll also tell you where users and visitors get stuck.

Another idea is to include clickable links on every page to make it easy for customers to find similar content or purchasable items. 

Page Depth

Page depth is a measure of how far into the process of purchasing your visitor is. For example, your website’s home page would be considered ‘shallow.’ 

In contrast, the page where the customer enters their credit card number to check out would be regarded as ‘deep.’ The idea is to follow the customer through their journey and to measure how far along your customer journey they travel. 

How Can I Improve My Page Depth?

A page’s depth should dictate how you format it so that it best appeals to customers based on where they are in their customer journey. 

Customers farther along, or deeper in, would likely want more detailed information, whereas you would want to use high-level information on shallower pages. Tailoring pages enhances the customer experience. 

You might also want to evaluate the checkout process if you see a lot of customers dropping out at that point.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate measures how many website visitors complete a set goal. For example, your desired goal may be for visitors to register as account members or purchase products. The conversion rate shows you how much of your website traffic reaches your intended goal. 

How Do I Measure Conversion Rate?

You’ll measure your conversion rate by dividing the number of completed conversions by the number of visitors to your site in a time period and then multiplying that by 100. This gives you a percentage of visitors who completed your conversion goal. 

For instance, let’s say you had 352 conversions last month and 1,582 total visitors. You’d take:

352 ÷ 1,582 = 0.2225 × 100 = 22.25% conversion rate.

So for the month, you had a 22.25% conversion rate.

How Can I Improve My Conversion Rate?

Depending on what you’re selling, your conversion rate may be affected by various factors. However, there is one factor that all companies have in common, regardless of industry: value. For customers to purchase your products or services, you must demonstrate that they can trust you will provide the best value to their lives or businesses. 

Your company can accomplish this by offering positive testimonials on your website or showing well-known companies who use your services. 

Returning Visitors

As the name implies, returning visitors are your visitors who decide to come back for more within a given period. Visitors may return to learn more about your services on an offer, purchase products, or read more informational articles in your website’s blog. Whatever the reason, returning visitors are invested in your company, and that’s a good start.

How Do I Track Returning Visitors?

The same cohort report mentioned for tracking pages per session can also track returning visitors by entering the timeframe and letting the software monitor the visits from individual IP addresses. 

The report should tell you how many people returned to your website and how many times they came back during that time. 

How Can I Increase My Returning Visitors?

Everyone likes to feel personally catered to, so customizing your pages is one great way to increase returning visitors. 

Little details that are helpful to the customer, such as showing their previously viewed products, your similar products, or linking to content related to their browsing history, can increase the number of visitors who use your website again. 

Time on Page

Time on page measures the amount of time (per session) in minutes or hours that a user spends on a specific page. This metric can help you determine if a page is helpful, or inversely, may be causing an issue in your customer’s journey.

What Counts as a Session?

A session is just the amount of time that they spend actively navigating around your website. During a session, a user may only view a single page, or they may go through multiple pages on your website. 

How Do I Track Time on Page?

Once you have determined which pages have the highest times, you analyze those pages for more details. Keep in mind that not every page should have a high time spent. For example, purchasing pages or pages where customers enter payment information should have low time spent, or customers may become frustrated with the complex process. 

Why Time on Page Isn’t Always Accurate

Although time on page can be a useful metric, it isn’t always the most accurate. When people leave a page open and switch to another tab, they aren’t consuming your content and still technically spending time on the page. 

Similarly, if they leave the page open while they take a break and do something else, it can skew your analysis. 

Conclusion

Comprehensive reports showing user engagement metrics are just the first step. By understanding the needs of your target audience, you can change your website landing pages to reflect better what your audience wants to know and interact with. 

It’s essential to measure your website’s user engagement to understand whether your website and landing pages make the most of the visitors’ attention. Before you can add value to your company and website, you must know what the people want. 

Kissmetrics provides the analyses and reports you need to measure customer engagement with your company’s website. Contact us today.

 

Sources:

5 Engagement Metrics That’ll Help Improve Your Search Rankings | Neilpatel.com

Average page depth | Adobe Analytics | Adobe.com

What is ‘Pages Per Session’ in Google Analytics & How Do I Increase It? | Databox.com