Stephanie Donelson

In today’s fast-paced world with many brands spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on content for consumers to, well, consume, it can be a tough landscape to make your content not only stand out but also capture the attention of your targeted audience. 

It’s said nowadays that we have a shorter attention span than a goldfish, so if your content is engaging your audience and keeping them active on your website, that’s a pretty good sign that your website and its content is successful. 

The more pages of your site they’re visiting and the longer they spend on each individual page generally correlates with more sales and repeat customers. In this blog post, I’m highlighting what engagement metrics you should be measuring as well as some tips and tricks on how to improve those results. 

If you’ve been wondering how engaging your content marketing is, you might want to use these common engagement metrics to evaluate your efforts.

What are the top user engagement metrics?

1. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is one of the first things I look at when evaluating a page’s value and engagement metrics. Because if the user is bouncing right away, that means the page is obviously not valuable nor engaging. It doesn’t matter how many sessions it got because it might as well have been zero.

To calculate bounce rate, you look at the percentage of website visitors that exit the site after only viewing one page. Most bounce rates come from search or organic traffic and the visitor quickly scans the page for the content they’re after, if it’s not there they’ll bounce away from the site. 

People typically bounce because the content isn’t what they expected, isn’t structured well, or they got bored with your content. Now, keep in mind that if you have a simple landing page for gated content that you email people, your bounce rate may be high on that page but that’s okay. The page is designed to be a one and done.

Lowering bounce rate should be focused on blogs, product pages, and other types of quality content. 

How to improve bounce rate

To improve your bounce rate, you’re really focusing on decreasing your bounce rate.

• Compare: Dive into analytics and look at your pages that have low bounce rates. What’s different about them? How the content’s laid out? The Calls to Action (CTAs)? How can you replicate this style on other pages of your site? Try to figure out what’s working on other pages of your site and apply those best practices to pages with high bounce rates.
• Focus on content: One main reason people bounce is because the content isn’t what they expected. Make sure you’re optimizing your content correctly for the right keywords and using those keywords in your headers to draw people’s attention to the right sections of content.
• Think of UX: If your site already has high bounce rates, the last thing you want to do is annoy your website visitors with tons of pop-ups or auto-play videos. Provide a good user experience or expect a high bounce rate.
• Clear CTAs: Does the user know what they’re supposed to do on this page or what action they should take next? Make sure the CTAs are clear and easy to act on.
• Internal linking: Use internal linking and CTAs to encourage people to visit more than one page of your site. 

2. Sessions or Pageviews

Pageviews or sessions tells you how much traffic your site is getting and shows how many people visited a particular page on your site. Typically, a high number of Pageviews is a good thing as it means people are finding your site and it’s most likely optimized well for SEO.

Sessions are a good metric for a quick glance and long-term tracking, but they shouldn’t be used alone or without other context. 

By knowing your average monthly or quarterly Pageviews, you can also run some good UX or content tests by seeing if your sessions drastically improve or didn’t perform the way you expected. 

How to improve your Pageviews

• Optimize website with SEO: Run keyword research and update your site’s content with new keyword terms or refreshed content. 
• Invest in off-page SEO: Promote your website and drive traffic to it with off-site SEO (SEO practices that happen off your own website). Add your website to industry directories, do some guest blogging or sponsored content, include links in email campaigns, share links on social media channels, participate in forum discussions, or ask for links from industry influencers. 
• Run content marketing campaigns: One easy way to drive up sessions is to break up quality content on a popular topic. Say you created a new ebook about a topic your audience enjoys. Well, turn that ebook into a few blogs, an infographic, and a video or podcast to continue driving traffic back to your site with content you know will perform well. 
• Good UX: Like I said up in the bounce rate section, you can’t provide a poor user experience and expect people to check out other pages of your site or want to return. Your site should load quickly and you should make your website easy to navigate so people can easily find the content they’re interested in. 

3. Time on page

Now that you know how to get people to your site, make sure they’re spending enough time there to actually read your content and take the right action. With this metric, you’ll want to look at both how long, on average, people are spending on the site as well as time spent on each page. 

Average session duration takes the session duration divided by the number of sessions in a specific time period. This gives you a nice average to compare high-performing pages against. For example, if you know your average time on site is two minutes but then you see that people are only on a specific blog page for 5 seconds, chances are good they didn’t actually read anything nor were they interested in the content. 

Average session duration shows all the time spent on your site by one user while time on page is specific to one page. 

Both of these metrics are valuable in gauging interest in your content and engagement with it. 

How to improve time on page and session duration

• Know your audience: Easily the fastest way to improve the time spent on your website is to know your audience and know what kind of content they’ll spend their time reading or listening to. 
• Use internal linking: Keep your website visitor engaged by telling them what page to visit next or provide links for further reading.
• Good navigation: Make it easy for your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for with a good navigation structure.
• Good UX: Again and again this will come up! A good UX is imperative to your site’s success and keeping people on the site. Too many pop-ups, ads, videos, or chat boxes will quickly push people away which will bring down your time on site and up your bounce rate. 

4. Pages per session

How much time they’re spending on the site can show you if they’re truly interested in your site’s content and/or products, but pages per session can also help illustrate this. This metric shows how many unique page visits there were per session, generally meaning that they were looking around your site for more information. 

Sometimes though, this can mean that they were having serious trouble finding what they were looking for and were just clicking around, so be sure to use this metric with others for the full picture. 

How to improve pages per session

• Internal linking and CTAs: Tell your website visitors what they should click on next or where they should go when they’re done with the page they’re on. 
• Good navigation: Use clear headers and site navigation to make it easy for users to find the content they’re after.
• Break up good content: Break up one giant blog post into several smaller ones to keep people reading new pages of your site. 

5. New vs. returning visitors

This metric helps you quickly assess how many people are loyal visitors of your website and how many are new visitors. While you do want return visits as that’s a sign of an engaged following, you also want to focus on attracting new customers and users to your site to grow your following.

If you see your new vs. returning visitors skewing toward only new users, that means your content isn’t engaging or valuable enough to bring people back to your site. 

How to improve new vs. returning visitors

• Optimize for SEO: Good keywords and optimization can help your website show up for searchers who may not be familiar with your brand.
• Run ads: Google Ads and social media ads are fantastic ways of reaching new audiences for specific keywords and search terms related to your brand and products.
• Promote website content on new channels: Try sponsoring content or partnering with an industry influencer on a webinar or podcast to reach new audiences and direct them back to your own site for more great content. 
• Be active on social media and email: Keep your audience and past customers consistently engaged with your brand by actively sharing your website content on social media and in email campaigns. 

6. Conversion rate

Finally, you should be tracking conversion rate in your content marketing metrics. The first goal of content marketing is to educate and engage but it also needs to tie into your brand’s overall goal of conversions or sales. Your conversion rate is calculated as the percentage of website visitors that complete an action, like a purchase, download, or submitting a form for more information.

Now, conversion rates can vary wildly from industry to industry and brand to brand. If you sell affordable shoes you’ll probably have a higher conversion rate than a hotel that comes in at $800 per night.

How to improve conversion rate

• Seamless navigation: A returning visitor who is ready to make a purchase should be able to easily and quickly navigate your site to the product page they’re looking for.
• Helpful pop-ups: Sometimes a chatbot or sales announcement pop-up can be helpful for people ready to convert. 
• Special offers pages: Having a box on the checkout page for discounts is standard these days but it also puts a pause on conversions as customers will hop out to look for discount codes or visit other sites for them. Make it easy for them to find discounts or special offers before they get into the checkout process by having a page dedicated to discount codes or promos. 

Are there other metrics you use to track user engagement? Tell me your thoughts in the comments below or give me a shout on Twitter!