Admit it, trying to track the success of your marketing campaigns is one of the major causes of your daily anxiety, right? If so, you aren’t alone. After all, campaigns are measured by their success and ROI.
Everything revolves around results — including your job.
Thankfully, in digital marketing, you can track pretty much anything. But one of the most important measurements is user engagement. What is it? It’s the assessment of how well visitors (i.e. potential customers) interact with your website.
Your site is your most valuable and powerful marketing tool. It’s also one of the final steps in the journey through the marketing/sales funnel. Depending on the quality of your content and navigation, your site can help advance each lead through the funnel on its way to becoming a valued customer.
That’s why user engagement is one of the most important marketing metrics you can track. And here are six proven ways to do it.
1. Acquisitions
This is at the top because getting traffic to your website is your biggest challenge. The acquisition metric helps determine how visitors found you, whether it’s through marketing and paid search campaigns, social media, organic search, or something else.
Knowing where they came from helps measure the success of your marketing efforts. Or, if they’re finding you more often through organic searches, start focusing your paid search and other campaigns on those keywords to attract even more leads.
After that, use the following metrics to measure the quality of your website’s user engagement.
2. Users
The prospective customers you’re trying to engage. There are several ways to track them, but one of the main assessments for companies selling a product is segmentation. Use demographics and other metrics to learn everything you can about them and break them into groups.
Understanding who they are, how they engage with your content, and most importantly, if they buy your product, will help determine which type of customers to focus on most in the future.
3. Session Length
A session is the number of pages visited and actions taken during a visit. The length or duration of that session helps you judge whether users are engaged by your content. Generally, the longer they stay, the more engaged they are. But not always.
Google Analytics defaults session lengths at 30 minutes. That means that if the user clicks on a page and stays there for more than half an hour, it doesn’t always mean they are deeply engrossed in your message.
It may just mean they walked away from their computer or mobile device and forgot to close the browser window.
4. Time on Page
According to research by the Nielsen Norman Group, the average page visit lasts less than a minute. And visitors only read 20-28% of the content, if that much.
That means you have 60 seconds or less to grab visitors’ attention. Then you need to convince them in just a few words that your product can help them, so they will pause long enough to read more.
Otherwise, they will leave, probably forever.
If time on page is more than a minute on average, that means you’re doing something right. If it isn’t, you need to review your content and page design.
Is it easy to read? Do your page headlines, sub-heads, and captions quickly give an impression of the benefits and value you offer? Is the body copy short and to the point? Long, dense copy will drive most people away.
5. User Flow
This is one of the most important engagement metrics you should be tracking. While other metrics show you how long users are on your site, user flow will map exactly where they went and when they exited.
Use it to weigh the strengths and problem areas of your overall site, content, and navigation. All three need to work in concert to point users where they need to go to find the information they need to move them through the funnel toward Sales Quality Lead.
6. Bounce Rate
In. Out. Gone. A bounce rate indicates how many users land on your site, but then leave without visiting other pages. It can be disheartening to see the number of people who take time to visit your site, but then quickly vanish without a trace.
At the same time, it can also be a positive thing if you study it the right away.
Your bounce rate can help pinpoint possible problem areas on your site. If bounces occur throughout, it could be a navigation issue. If you trace them to specific pages, visitors may not be finding the information they need.
Connect with Users and Increase Engagement
Like all marketing metrics, user engagement helps you assess the effectiveness of your campaigns and content marketing by studying the behavior of your target audience after they reach your website.
So how do you increase user engagement? Through focused strategies, integrated marketing campaigns, and highly-focused content tailored for your target audiences.
And we can help. Talk to us. Our talented marketing and creative teams can work with you to fine tune your site content so you can connect with your users on a much deeper level.
