Measuring user engagement is critical to any online marketing effort. These measurements will tell you if there are areas in your website that need to be enhanced in terms of optimization elements; if the optimization technique is still effective or not, is your landing page well-optimized and provides answer to user query. Is your marketing material effective enough in triggering user behavior to get engaged with your business? Understanding these, the challenge now lies on how such user engagement can be measured and created.
Owners of business websites should know that not because they have a website running on the World Wide Web, they can just sit back and relax and wait for the successful conversion of leads. Assuming that the website is optimized for search engines, there can be an expected increase in traffic to the site. But why are there any conversions so far? What could be wrong with your website or your SEO techniques?
As a website owner, it is important to answer these questions as the answers would lead you to doing the one thing that you have so far neglected doing – measuring user engagement. You need to find out how the people visiting your site interact with your site. Do they stay long or do they quickly close the site and move on to the next one. Did they visit the other pages within the site?
The following can help you measure user engagement and some tips on the side.
- Search Engines and user engagement. By using Google Analytics, you can measure user engagement by setting goals for each action that you describe as engagement; define a non-brand keyword visits segment (they are the visitors landing on your website using keywords not related to your brand); check the keywords that win and those that lose. This should give you a general idea on how your website engaged the users. You might notice that some keywords trigger a better conversion rate than others.
- Landing pages and user engagement. Discover the leaks from your landing pages as some users that come from certain keywords are likely to engage but the landing pages they end up with are not helpful. This should be resolved immediately so as not to waste the user already on your landing pages. Look for big bounce rates and take action against them. If need be, redesign the website or the landing pages in order to get the users engaged.
- Behavioral targeting and user engagement. Click on the top pages and look for the entrance keywords report. Now check out the bounces for each keyword. A high diversity between bounce rates proves that different users visit with different intentions. Offer customized content like headings, call to actions which readers should find interesting and compelling them to take action.
Know though that user engagement is not one you can measure with a standard formula. It is a mix of quality and quantity metrics varying from website to website. However, users that post comment on your blogs, subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feed, submits a contact form, or buy something are the kind of users that engage.
It is very important to note how users behave when they visit your site to come up with tactics that will increase not only website traffic but conversion as well. Changes may be made to hit targeted goals and to attract more users to enter and be engaged with your website.
One of the many advantages of online marketing is that any online marketing experts or practitioners can easily track down data and measure the quality of their marketing material. From there on, they can easily improve their strategy and be more effective.
