Measuring engagement metrics with your website and content gives insight into how user’s are experiencing your site and which pages, types and pieces of content, and all of your other marketing efforts are supporting your overall business growth and success. There are many important engagement metrics you can measure to assess your current and potential future marketing success. Measurement is key if you want to keep focused and aligned with your marketing campaign. Without measurement, you might still achieve some success, but you may not know exactly how you got there. According to Hinge, high growth firms track 33 percent more metrics to monitor effectiveness.
With metrics, you can see exactly where in your marketing campaign your efforts have paid off and where you could make some adjustments. The following are some useful metrics you can use to see how well people are engaging with your content and to know when it is time is to make some necessary adjustments.
Time Spent on Site
Measuring the time users spend on your site lets you know how well you are engaging your visitors across different areas of your website. This information provides insight into which areas of your site could be improved. For example, if users do not spend much on a particular landing page, you can then investigate why this is the case. Is the layout poor? Is the page itself unappealing? Does it load too slow? How about the quality of that page’s content? If you have a transaction page and many visitors abandon their shopping cart, could there be complications with purchasing? All of these things impact how much time a visitor will spend on a page.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is how many visitors immediately leave your site after they’ve clicked your link. Bounce rate is an important metric to measure because keeping it low prevents you from dropping in SEO rankings. Google and other search engines notice a high bounce rate and as a result, they view you as less popular, meaning that you will rank lower on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Your bounce rate could be high for multiple reasons; pages might be too slow to load (anything more than a second is generally too slow), your content may be irrelevant to the user’s search (was your meta-description misleading?), or maybe you’re not using enough relevant keywords on that specific page. Ultimately, if a site visitor’s expectations have not begun to be satisfied immediately, they will probably leave.
Social shares
Shares on social media are a strong indicator of your audience’s level of engagement with your content. A share means that someone has taken the time to read your content, and has enjoyed it so much that they want others to read/watch/listen and enjoy it too. Unlike likes and comments, which do not necessarily mean that a person has consumed your content, shares usually mean full engagement.
Email Newsletter Sign-ups
‘If we’ve created great content or helped a reader find the solution they were looking for, we’re far more likely to see them sign up for our newsletter’, says Steven Rudnik of CK3 Guides.
Email newsletter signups give us an idea of how well our content resonates with readers. Engaging content will inspire readers to seek more, which can lead to a subscription (providing you add clear calls-to-action throughout the content).
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is one of the most important and telling metrics you can track. Every piece of content you create and share has the potential to sway someone’s decision to convert. If your content is consistently high in relevance and quality, then it is going to contribute towards a high conversion rate.
When your conversion rate is high, that is a good sign that your content is engaging and that your marketing efforts are paying off. Always make sure you outline clear conversion goals – it’s great to reeve a high conversion rate but you need to know how you are going to market to those conversions after they have signed up.
Page Views
One metric that most people track is pageviews – the volume of traffic received by a specific page. This is quite a general metric, so it is not the best sign of engagement. Your marketing campaign may end up driving a lot of traffic to your site but that doesn’t mean people are engaging with your content. Still, you can use this metric for insight. If your page views are high but your other engagement metrics are low, then you know that you need to make some adjustments.
You can also measure page views from the traffic that has come from within your website. This is a more accurate engagement metric as it means that a visitor has taken the time to further explore your site.
Gain Insight with Engagement Metrics
Monitor your campaign efforts as much as possible to gain valuable insight into areas that are working and those which are not. By closely examining elements of success and failure you can save more time later. Instead of trying to readjust your entire campaign, metrics allow you to hone in on which specific areas need improvement and which are paying off.
