The website is often the central hub for all of a business’s online activities. Whether they emphasize blogging, eCommerce, or lead generation, online campaigns need to draw meaningful engagements. This article will discuss what engagement metrics are most important and how to boost the exact website metrics that matter.

Types of Website Engagement Metrics

First of all, the metrics that matter should always be dependent on your goals. Not every website is looking to generate sales and not every webpage needs to minimize its bounce rate, lest we spend time worrying about numbers that don’t fulfil our goals. Similarly, if your purpose is to increase branding you may want clicks. However, if your end goal is sales, you might want to measure click-through vs conversion rate.

These things are contextual, so set your goals first and match them to the types of engagement metrics. There are a number of key metrics for online traffic that are worth considering.

• Bounce Rate
• Time on Page
• Pages per visit
• Click-Through Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Abandonment Rate
• Order Value (for eCommerce stores)

You also need to understand what is and isn’t engagement and what is the difference between clicks and impressions. Clicks are the first step of meaningful engagement while impressions are views of an advertisement or post. Impressions do not necessitate an interaction and having a massive gulf between impressions and clicks means people are (for whatever reason) looking at your content but not clicking.

You can always use a click-through rate calculator (such as this one) and compare your percentage of impressions. Keep in mind that everything above 2% is considered above average.

More on how to improve CTR and traffic later.

Important Content Engagement Metrics

In terms of content, there are some additional engagement metrics worth keeping track of. These include shares, comments, and reactions. Generally, the purpose of marketing content is to act as a face for the company’s brand or operations. In this case, aiming for shareability is the highest aspiration.

There are also product engagement metrics, which can include revenue, orders, or interest. Interest can be gauged in different ways like how many times something has been put on a wishlist or how many times visitors check a product page. Similarly, it’s always good to track how someone found a product. Sometimes they find it from search engines and other times from a related products tab. You can optimize for the right source of traffic in this way.

Improving Traffic

Starting off, it helps to know which reports indicate how traffic arrived at a website. On Google Analytics, you need to go to insights, then reports, and finally to the overview section. The first step to improving traffic is understanding where and when your website peaks in traffic and which devices are most prominent. This can give you a clue as to what to improve and when to post.

The cheapest way to drive traffic to a website is generally SEO. Knowing the right keywords and getting search engine clicks can go a long way compared to paid traffic. However, SEO is also a long-term strategy and doesn’t just change overnight. It also requires a lot more continuous management.

What is one common cause of low click-through rates? The content might not be appealing enough. Run some A/B tests with slight variations to find the issue. Another issue might be that your target may be going to incorrect demographics.

Another way to improve traffic is by looking at external avenues of reaching consumers and whether they are optimized.

External Engagement Metrics

There are certain types of metrics that originate from other channels that link to your page. Examining these channels may be a good idea to see if the problem originates there.

If this seems confusing, here’s an example: you send out a mail campaign to push a new product on your eCommerce store. However, the numbers don’t add up. The problem may not always originate in the page you’re trying to push through the campaign but rather in the campaign itself.

So, in this case, email engagement metrics or social media metrics should be taken into account for example.

Here are some external metrics worth considering before you alter your page to improve engagement:

1. Organic Search: Check how much of your search is organic
2. Referrals: effective referring domains are worth keeping track of along with whether links are broken
3. Social Media: check your stats using social media analytics and plug-ins like Facebook pixel
4. Email: Check whether your emails are bouncing or not reaching their destination
5. Paid Search: The opposite end of organic search
6. Direct Traffic: How many direct domain visits are you getting vs search engines
7. Other Campaigns: Keep track of places where you are pushing your site

With external sources, you need to watch out for campaigns bouncing.

How to calculate Hard Bounce Rates & Strategies to Fix it

We’ve already done an article comparing exit rate vs bounce rate and when these values matter. Now let’s discuss the difference between soft bounces and hard bounces. Soft bounces point toward temporary issues that deter email or message delivery while hard bounces point towards permanent or persistent ones.

While this applies to email campaigns, emails can be a great source of traffic. Thus, it is important to manage bounce rates.

To calculate the hard bounce rate, you need to subtract soft bounces from the total number of bounces. Then, divide the hard bounce rate from the total number of emails and multiply by 100.

To decrease your hard bounce rate for campaigns:

• You should refresh your email list to get rid of unused addresses.
• Similarly, make sure your system is double opt-in where subscribers confirm their email address by clicking on a confirmation email. This can weed out bad addresses.
• Generally, free email services have high bounce rates and paid ones are more efficient.
• Sending regular emails also helps engagement (although too frequent might put you in a spam folder).
• Make sure your website is verified before you send emails.

How to Increase Session Duration

After clickthrough, most types of engagement follow from having a decent session duration. It’s one thing to get clicks on the page but entirely another to maintain the interest of visitors, making it particularly important for B2B website metrics. This is crucial not just for SEO, but also for meaningful conversions.

So, what is a good average session duration? 2 to 3 minutes, generally. Keep in mind, that this is for non-navigational pages i.e., ones where consumers find what they searched for. If the session duration is just a few seconds, search engines see that as a red flag and lower your score, especially if the user goes back to the SERP (indicating they didn’t find what they were looking for).

Some tips for improving Sessions durations:

• Improve Page Speeds since users may log off if loading times are too long (website speed optimization services can help out with this)
• Use the right keywords/remove unnecessary ones
• Use long-tail keywords to get more specific audiences
• Add more content
• Optimize for the correct devices (increases mobile, tablet, or PC)

Unique Engagement & Retention Metrics

Finally, we’ll talk about how to keep people coming back and how to increase new users. If you want to increase monthly active users or if your website’s goal is to increase subscribers or sign-ups, there are a few things worth doing.

• Keeping people engaged with your product requires constant content updates and reminders
• Improve your UX
• Keep people interested with periodic content like newsletters or weekly update emails
• As you grow, you may want to keep track of changes in page speed and servers to cater to more people while maintaining website efficiency
• Creating options for signing up or subscribing if you don’t have them already
  • Similarly, allow people to opt for updates or email reminders
  • Use reminders to suggest products customers might like if you run a store
  • Similarly, use shopping cart reminders to get people to finish transactions
• Another important metric is unique visitors vs returning visitors. To attract more:
  • Try advertising to new demographics
  • You could also try more specific long-tail keywords that aim at different users
  • Collaborate on content or try influencer marketing that targets outside your wheelhouse
  • Publish press releases, use cases, and other content that showcases your services