Website Engagement: Bigger Doesn't Mean Better

-

Bounce rate  0% - CHECK

Pages per Sessions 2 per session - CHECK

Avg. Session Duration  2 min - CHECK

Avg. Time on Page  30 seconds - CHECK

 Those are generally industry-respected metrics in regards to website engagement, and if you told a lot of your higher-ups and bosses these you might feel like your winning. But here are a few more metrics for you that might make you think otherwise:
Newsletter Subscribes Conversion Rate  < 1%

Lead Form Capture Conversions  < .5%

Ecommerce Conversion Rate < 1%

One of the things that I hold dear in my most recent training with www.digitalmarketer.com is that site engagement metrics are looking at metrics more in the sense of "what is the degree to which people are engaging". 

I love that. The first set of metrics could be fine, or you could have a problem in engagement, but you have to really scrutinize your bottom-line to really figure that out. What we do know is that something about our website, our marketing, etc. nets us the following conversion rates. How do you get around this? TESTING and TARGETS.

TESTING

Having an organized set of testing around these conversion rates, as it relates to engagement, will help you determine if you need a better time on page, or bounce rate. Maybe for your site, the bounce rate is way too high? Perhaps the pages per session are just over 2, and you need like 3-5 in order for someone to get to a key part of your site. Or, inversely, maybe you aren't getting to your key selling or lead magnets fast enough. In order to see if engagement is directly tied to conversion, you will need to isolate the KPIs you are looking to improve and understand the journeys your current audiences are taking so you can test each of those touchpoints.

TARGETS

For some sites, the engagement you have might just be a reality. For example, you are a mechanical engineering firm that builds large equipment for automotive, military use. The price tag is high, which can mean your conversion rates naturally can be lower. To understand if your engagement is well and good, see what your total number of leads are. Regardless of the conversion rate, if you know that and can go back to a target set you'll know if your engagement degree is one you like or not. If you don't like it, you might just need to fill the hopper a bit more to get to the target to see if that engagement rate is effective given your investment in potential marketing efforts to gain more users. If the rubber meets the road and you find that the price tag to do that is too high, then you might want to go to testing to see if you can't figure out a better path to success.

CONCLUSION

Remember, engagement metrics are just a degree of which people are using the site. It never had anything to do with good or bad for the most part. If you aren't seeing your main KPIs grow, then you need to test and see if focusing on those metrics to see if by changing those that increase your bottom line. If by chance it's not a question of engagement, or that's just the type of business you have, you need to test the thought of bringing more users to you and see if that gets you to where you want to be.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 Steps to Measure Your Omnichannel Performance Using Digital Analytics

-
Image
  photo credit: Karolina Grabowska We had an interesting question come up the other day about how many leads does content get versus how many leads does advertising get. It's a great question, but, as analysts, if you were just going to report a number then you would be doing a disservice to the real problems at hand. Here is how I see this: - The original ask isn't a true business question that an analyst should really try and frame each question she or he is trying to answer - The question within the question is more important. What I believe is being asked is "how good are these channels and why do we need both if one is better than the other?" - maybe there's a bias towards one or the other, but you have to get to the heart of the matter The real things to solve for are the following: 1) Do we get leads ATTRIBUTED to content? 2) Is that lead ATTRIBUTED to content at the first touchpoint or in the journey? 3) If someone sees an AD with CONTENT during the journe...
Read more

The Sequence Segment: You're New Desired Path Best Friend

-
Image
One of the key steps in the creative process when designing a website is to think of the different desired paths you want users to go through in order to convert. Sure you can get expensive journey analytics tools, but that isn't practical or cheap. Google's out of box reporting: the navigation summary report is very limiting and the behavior flow report can look a bit clunky. So what's an analyst like you to do?  Our Story Problem Let's look at an example involving an online retailer that just designed a new site. They'd like users to first land on their homepage, learn about their business and products, go to a categories page to choose specific products, then get to a product detail page and buy. The trick is that they are realistic in that they know that people do their research. They want to know if their users are doing this across multiple sessions to buy, not just one session. If they know this then they know the journey they want users to take is wor...
Read more

3-Step Process to Escape the Tinkering Mentality and Enter a Comprehensive Digital Strategy

-
Image
Greetings Degurgitators! It's been a minute, hasn't it? I've had a few things going on outside of the professional life that's kept me busy. One of the greatest things happening to me is that my oldest is starting Kindergarten. I'm beyond a blessed dad.  But let's get right into it. I want to talk about how to escape the tinkering mentality of your website. Those onesie-twosie things you think that are just going to raise conversion rates just might not be what you think will happen. I'm not saying that certain small changes won't help exactly, but often times those types of changes happen with testing around a specific goal. How does this happen? This often happens when thorough objectives, goals, and measurement strategy isn't really there. I'll often hear that the goal is to "make more money" or to "sell more **blank**". That isn't rooted in any specific strategy. What's more difficult is that it's...
Read more