Nowadays, an effective website is the most important aspect of a digital marketing campaign. Every website needs good, quality content that will grab people’s attention, otherwise, consumers will likely not be interested in the product/service. Creating an effective content marketing strategy takes time and analysis of the results; there’s no use generating persuasive content ideas unless you can measure whether those ideas are effective. It is important to know how engaged your users are with your website in order to grow and improve your digital marketing strategies. Measuring user engagement is an integral part of running a successful marketing campaign. There are different metrics used for measuring user engagement, here are some of the best.
Visitor Recency
The first step to measuring user engagement is understanding web analytics. As stated in the Aberdeen Customer Engagement Report from 2014, “customer retention is 14% higher among companies applying big data and analytics to sales velocity,” meaning figures gathered from web analytics can help to improve customer experience. Web analytics is a term used to describe how the impact of a website is measured, in other words, it defines the method used to find out if your content is engaging. There are different software tools needed for web analytics, the most popular is Google Analytics.
One of the key metrics used to assess the performance of a website is visitor recency, which measures the amount of time between a users’ visits. So, you will be able to see how frequently people are interacting with your website, be it once, twice a day, or maybe only once a year … it is important to know if users are returning to your site in order to evaluate the success of your content marketing strategy. If many people are returning to your site regularly, it means they are relying on the service/product your site provides. If the majority of your users are infrequent visitors, then you will have to assess what is stopping them from returning to your site.
Core User Actions
Another way of assessing user engagement is by analyzing core user actions. Core user actions depend on what your site provides, for example if you have created an online social game, joining the game is considered a core user action. If your site doesn’t offer a quantifiable service, such as playing a game, a way of measuring core user actions is through call-to-actions, like signing up for a newsletter, for example. A newsletter can be easily created via beneficial and simple to use e-marketing software providers such as Newsletter2Go, and this is a great way of measuring core user actions.
In fact, it was found that in 2015 that 95% of those that opt-in to an email list find the messages to be very useful. What’s more, around 50% of marketers are making use of email marketing software, meaning that it’s still a relatively untapped opportunity. If you have a sign up button on your website, the amount of people who use this button to sign up to your newsletter will tell you how engaged they are with your site, because they are taking the time to respond to a call to action and are interacting with one of the services provided by your site.
Activity Time
Not only should you know how frequently people are visiting your website, you should also know how long they are spending to browse the site. If there is a lot of content on your website but the average visit lasts a short amount of time, this could mean your content is not very engaging. Or if your web pages take a long time to load, this could mean that users are getting frustrated and abandoning your website.
“The change in a website bounce rate increases by 100% when a page takes 4 seconds or more to load. It increases by 150% if a page takes 8 seconds or more to load,” states web experts Mobile Joomla.
So make sure you know how much time users are spending on your site, and evaluate whether they are truly engaging with your content.
