One of the most important things to understand when examining your digital marketing and user experience strategy is the customer journey. The more you know about the journey your customers take with your brand, the better equipped you are to give them what they need when they need it, both helping your customers and increasing your revenue in the process.
Fortunately, there are several user engagement metrics that can help.
User engagement metrics track the actions members of your audience take along the customer journey. These actions may be as simple as staying on your website for a certain period of time, coming back to your website from time to time, making a purchase, and more. Nonetheless, keeping track of user engagement metrics can help you build your business.
Why Focus on User Engagement?
Your user engagement strategy can make the difference between your company thriving or struggling. The bottom line is simple, high levels of user engagement mean your visitors are having a positive user experience. The more positive your user experience is, the more money you stand to make. By focusing on the user experience, you can make the following improvements to your business.
- Create More Effective Marketing Campaigns: When you track user engagement, you’re able to see what marketing efforts are leading to the most engagement and which ones are missing the mark. This gives you the ability to fine-tune your marketing strategy to make it more effective.
- Solidify Your Position as a Leader: As you work through your user engagement strategy and users become more active, you solidify your brand as a leader in your industry.
- Word-of-Mouth Advertising: When users engage with your brand and enjoy the experience of doing so, they’re more likely to share your brand on social media and tell their friends and family about you. This word-of-mouth advertising can prove invaluable.
- Increase Revenue: All of the above means that users are more likely to purchase your products and services. As a result, you benefit from increased revenues.
Key User Engagement Metrics To Watch
It’s essential to keep track of user engagement data for your website and make changes to improve engagement in response to what you find. But if you’ve never done so, you may be at a loss for where to start.
There are several ways to look at user engagement analytics and countless user engagement metrics you can track. However, there are ten metrics that provide just about everything you need to know when it comes to how your users engage with your brand. Read on to learn more.
1. Average Session Duration
One of the most effective ways to measure user engagement on your website is to determine your average session duration. As the name of the metric suggests, average session duration is the average amount of time a user spends on your website when they visit it.
A reasonable benchmark for average session duration is between two and four minutes. That means if your average user spends more than four minutes on your website, you’re doing well. If they spend less than two minutes on your website, there’s room for improvement.
So, how do you improve average session duration? Here are a few pointers:
- Make sure your content is engaging. If you have too much thin content, focus on improving your content development.
- Create a funnel with your content that guides your users to different pages on your website.
- Update your marketing strategy to focus on users who are more likely to spend time on your website.
2. Stickiness
Stickiness is similar to average session duration. It’s a term used in internet marketing that relates to how much users want to stick around. However, stickiness doesn’t just relate to how long users spend on your site, it also relates to what percentage of users return.
Consider this a customer loyalty metric. The more sticky your website is, the more your users will want to come back time and time again. If you realize your users are coming on a one-and-done basis, consider taking the following steps to improve:
- Provide new content regularly
- Entice your users to subscribe to your mailing list
3. Retention Rate
Your retention rate is relevant if you run a subscription service. This tells you the percentage of your customers that stick around for specific periods of time. For example, if your annual retention rate is 80%, that means that about 80% of the users that sign up for your services will stick around for at least one year.
When you work to improve your retention rate, consider the following:
- Adjust your marketing efforts to focus on the portion of your audience that sticks with your service the longest.
- Find points when cancellations are commonplace, figure out why, and make changes to prevent cancellations.
- Always work to improve your service for your customers.
4. Churn Rate
Another key metric to track is your churn rate. This is the opposite of your retention rate. It’s the percentage of your users that cancel services over a predetermined period of time. For example, if your monthly churn rate is 5%, it means that five out of every hundred users will typically cancel their services each month.
The goal here is to bring your churn rate down. To do so, focus on the same tips above for increasing your retention rate.
5. Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is critical to your business. It’s the percentage of users who make a purchase when they visit your website. The higher your conversion rate is, the more money you make for each dollar you spend on ads. Lower conversion rates could mean you lose money when you advertise.
Average conversion rates vary wildly depending on the product or service you sell. It’s a good idea to determine what the average conversion rate is in your industry and strive to beat it. When you work to improve your conversion rate, consider the following.
- Audience Selection: Use analytics data to determine which demographics are most likely to purchase your products and services. When you do, mold the customer journey around this specific audience. Create ads, landing pages, and email campaigns that appeal to the target audiences that are most likely to buy something.
- Adjust Campaign Targets: Instead of focusing on making sure as many people see your ad as possible, focus on making sure the people who are likely to buy something are most likely to see your ad.
- Update Pricing: Perform a pricing analysis by looking into how much money your competitors charge for products and services similar to yours. If your pricing is less than competitive, adjust it to become a more competitive option.
6. Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is the percentage of sessions on your website in which the user only visits one page, hence the term “bounce” rate. Essentially, these users find your website and bounce right off of it, rather than working their way through your funnel. Here are some benchmarks to compare your current bounce rate to:
- 26% to 40%: A bounce rate between 26% and 40% is considered extremely low. That means you’re doing a great job of keeping your audience engaged.
- 41% to 55%: If you have a bounce rate between 41% and 55%, your rate is about average.
- 56% to 70%: If you have a bounce rate between 56% and 70%, your rate is high, but it may not be a cause for concern in some industries.
- Over 70%: A bounce rate over 70% is very high unless you operate a blog or news website in which users typically only visit one page.
If you’re interested in improving your bounce rate, keep the following tips in mind:
- Content is king. Make sure the content on your website is compelling.
- Engage your audience with your content by enticing them to share, comment, and write reviews.
- Make sure you’re marketing the right products to the right audiences.
- Use your content to guide your customers to other pages on your website.
7. Abandonment Rate
The abandonment rate on a website is the percentage of tasks users fail to complete when they’re in the process of doing so. For example:
- Abandoned Subscriptions: This happens when someone signs up for an email subscription on your website but never confirms the subscription in their email.
- Abandoned Carts: This happens when users shop on your website, fill up their shopping cart, but never actually place an order.
- Abandoned Enrollments: This happens when a potential client gets partially through the enrollment process.
It’s important to keep your abandonment rates low in order to grow your business. Here are a few tips to help improve your abandonment rates:
- Use analytics to determine why users are abandoning tasks.
- Address the cause of abandonment. For example, if you find your merchant processor requires too much information to process orders, consider changing your vendor to one that makes the checkout process easy.
- Focus on simplicity in every step of every task. Tasks that are too difficult to complete are often abandoned.
8. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a widely accepted metric across internet marketers that’s based on the response to a single survey question. That question is, “How likely would you be to refer a friend or family member?”
The higher your NPS is, the more likely your users are to refer their friends and family to your brand. This is a valuable measure of user engagement, but it also shows you how your efforts to increase word-of-mouth advertising are performing. Consider the following tips for increasing your NPS:
- Always work to provide the best experience possible for your users.
- Train your team to take extra steps to understand what customers need, rather than simply making sales.
- Make sure any questions your customer might have about your product, service, or process are answered adequately.
- Follow up quickly when your customers need assistance.
9. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The customer satisfaction score, or CSAT, is a user engagement metric that measures how satisfied your customers are with the products or services they receive. You generate the score by taking a survey of your customers and specifically asking, “How satisfied are you with our product or service?” Then simply average out the responses to determine your score.
Of course, your goal is for your CSAT score to be as high as possible. After all, the more satisfied your customers are, the more likely they are to come back for repeat business and refer their friends and family. Here are a few things you can do to improve your CSAT scores:
- Make sure your product or service comes with all the features customers generally expect to see when they purchase it.
- Employ properly trained customer service representatives who know how to address customer concerns quickly and effectively.
- Be sure to properly educate your customer on your product or service throughout the sales process.
- Provide adequate instructions for how to use your product or service.
10. User Activity
User activity relates to the number of users who are active on your website over a specific period of time. These periods are often daily, weekly, and monthly. Read below to learn more about each.
Daily Active Users (DAU)
Daily Active Users tells you how many users are active on your website each day. Increase your number of daily active users by providing new content for your users to consume on a daily basis.
Weekly Active Users (WAU)
Weekly Active Users is the number of users who are active on your website over the course of a week. You can increase your weekly active users by hosting weekly events or sending out weekly emails to inform your stagnant users of what they’re missing out on.
Monthly Active Users (MAU)
Monthly Active Users relates to the number of users you have active on your website over the course of a month. Increase your MAUs by hosting monthly events and sending out regular messages to keep your visitors engaged.
Know What’s Working for Your Business With Detailed Insights
If you’re looking for help utilizing data and gaining insight into your audiences, our expert teams at AUDIENCEX can help. With integrated solutions, futureproof tools, analytics and data science, we can help you gain deeper visibility to understand who your consumers are and where to find and engage them with custom, scalable acquisition strategies.
Our machine learning technology continually analyzes the major social, search, and programmatic platforms to bring you a genuinely unified strategy that looks beyond channels to find audiences throughout the digital landscape. As a result, we see more meaningful engagement, whether on display, video, search, social, native, CTV, or beyond. And with seamless cross-channel reporting and analytics, you’ll continue to gain valuable insights that can optimize live campaigns and inform future strategies. To learn more about how we can support your agency or brand, reach out for a free consultation today.