How to measure engagement on your website
Before we get to how to measure engagement, let's start by defining engagement on your website. The goal for most websites is to get the visitors to engage with the content, usually by reading articles or clicking on links. An engaged visitor stays longer and interact more with the website.
There are a few different signs that your visitors are engaged with the content, and here are some of the metrics you can use: bounce rate, exits, time spent, page views, returning visitors, clicks, and scroll. Depending on the analytics tool you use, some of these metrics are automatically collected while other require additional setup.
Neither metric will give the full image, and it's therefore a good idea to combine different metrics for measuring the engagement. Which metrics are best for you will depend on what kind of website you have, and how the visitors should interact with it.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is the share of visitors who only viewed one page before leaving. For visitors to be engaged, you want them to interact with the page and probably move on to other pages. You therefore generally want a low bounce rate.
Exits
The exits tell you how many visitors left on a particular page. As much as your visitors need to leave at some point, pages with higher than average (for your website) exit rates may indicate lower engagement. It could be that these are also the most visited pages, but maybe there is a pattern where your visitors are more likely to exit on a certain page type.
Time spent on page
Time spent on page is what is says on the tin, it tells you how long the visitors stay for (however, depending on the tool you use, the exits can affect the average time spent on the website). If your visitors are engaged with the content, they should stay long enough to read the content before moving on. There isn't one specific time that counts as being engaged, as the time spent on the page is related to how much information there is on the page, and also the type of page.
Page views
You can use your page views as a metric of the engagement on your website, since engaged visitors are likely to visit several pages before leaving. For example, you can look at the average number of page views per visit, or you can look at how many page views specific pages get. There are many reasons as to why a specific page may have low views, but if there is a pattern related to page type or subject, there may be a problem with the engagement.
Returning visitors
An engaged visitor is likely to return to your website, because they like your content or your products. The share of returning visitors can therefore be used as a measurement of engagement. The average share of returning visitor differs between different types of websites, and it is therefore best to only compare to yourself. For example, you can see if the changes you made to you website has affected the share of returning visitors.
Clicks
By measuring clicks, you will not only be able to see if the visitors click on internal links, but also which links they click on. Engaged visitors are likely to use internal links to read related articles, view similar products, or simply navigating further out of curiosity. You don't need to track every click, but you can select which clicks are the best measurement of engagement on your website.
Scrolls
Another way of measuring engagement is to see how far the visitors are scrolling. Engaged visitors are likely to scroll down, for example to read the text or look for links and related information. For scrolls, it may be a good idea to combine how far down they scrolled and how long they stayed on the website. For example, scrolling down quickly indicates that they are looking for something specific, such as a keyword in a heading or a link. If they instead scroll down more slowly, it indicates that they read the content as they scrolled.
