We’ve all heard that having a well-functioning website is one of the most important things a business can boast of today as far as digital marketing is concerned.
For a website to convert well, it needs to have high-quality content that captures the attention of its readers and consequently attracts them into buying available products or services. Creating an excellent content marketing strategy can be time-consuming.
For this reason, it’s important that you are able to measure the effectiveness of the persuasive content ideas you are using for the strategy. This helps you understand how engaged your users are with your site which is key a successful marketing campaign.
In order to measure user engagement on your website, a few metrics can help. Below are the top three metrics you can use to measure your website’s user engagement.
1. Visitor Recency
Web analytics are key to measuring user engagement. In a study conducted by Aberdeen Customer Engagement in 2014, it found out that companies that apply data and analytics to sales velocities recorded a 14% more customer retention than those that didn’t. This shows that the findings from the web analytics helped these companies improve on their customer experience.
Web analytics can simply be defined as a method that can help to measure the impact of a website- whether its content is engaging or converts. Several web analytics tools are available today with the most popular being Google Analytics.
One of the most important metrics that can be used to assess how a website is performing is visitor recency. Simply put, this is a measure of the length of time between visits made by a particular user. With the information you get using this metric, you will learn how often people are interacting with your business, be it once per day, twice per month, or even once per year.
This will assist you know whether users are returning to your site which is also a key measure of whether your content marketing strategy is effective. So, if you find out that numerous users are returning to your site regularly, there is a high possibility that they are enjoying using your products/services. On the other hand, if the user return rate is low, then it’s time to assess what might be stopping them from returning to your business.
2. Activity Time
Now that you’ve assessed and probably found out the frequency at which users are visiting your website, it’s time to understand how much time on average they are spending to browse your site. If your website has a considerable amount of content but still the average time spent by users on your site is low, this could be an indication that your content is not be engaging enough.
On the other hand, check whether your website load times are slow which can cause frustrations to users and possibly result in most of them abandoning it.
According to various studies, website pages that take 4 seconds or more to load record increases in bounce rate by up to 100 percent. If a page takes 8 seconds or more, that rate could shoot to up to 150 percent.
With this, it’s important to assess the amount of time users spend on your website so you can understand whether there’s a need to further improve on your user engagement using content.
3. Core User Actions
Assessing core user actions is another excellent way of understanding how good your user engagement is. Different sites have different core user actions depending on what they are providing. For example, for a site that offers an online social game, joining that game is what is considered to be the core user action for the site.
For websites that do not offer quantifiable services, the most common methods used to measure core user actions is by evaluating how users respond to call-to-actions such as signing up for a newsletter.
With only about 50 percent of webmasters using email marketing software and autoresponders such as Aweber to request users to opt in to their email lists, it means that this is one of the largely untapped marketing opportunities that should bring in good results.
So, when your website records poor results while using such a tool, then it’s time to assess how well your content engages your users. As such, the ratio of people who take action on your site against those that do not should help you evaluate your website’s overall user engagement.
