In this age of the internet, producing and offering content can boost your business in different ways. Perhaps the potential customer finds you through a search result for the product/service you offer, or perhaps they are searching for an article about this product or service and have come to you.
Content engagement is the way your target audience interacts with this content. It can happen in different ways, from likes and shares on social media to comments on a website or blog. The goal is the same: you want people to consume your content, get to know your business or brand, and connect with it.
But it isn’t easy to know whether such engagement is really effective. Visit numbers don’t always mean people are interacting with content. Sometimes they ended up on your website accidentally and stayed there for only a few minutes.
There are some criteria to analyze the performance of your content and especially the user engagement with it. Here are some of the most common metrics that you should look at more closely.
1. Conversions.
Conversion rate is the most important metric if you work with e-commerce, but it can refer to any action: from online sales to the number of hits on a certain article. If your website gets 1,000 visits in a month and makes 200 sales within the same time period, divide the second number by the first, then multiply by 100 to find out the conversion rate–in this example, 20 percent.
Sites with different proposals have different conversion rates. But tracking it will show you how close you are to reaching the proposed goals (be it sales or visits).
Here are a few ways to improve a website’s conversion rate:
- Be careful with the design of your landing page (it’s the one that will welcome visitors).
- Simplify your writing style. Avoid long articles with fluffy content that do not satisfy the user’s intent.
- Add “call-to-action” options so that the visitor can participate more actively while browsing (from subscribing to a newsletter to rating your articles).
- If your website requires visitors to fill in forms, enter as few fields as possible.
- Avoid very large images or videos as your site speed is critical.
- Use some tools that can guide you to create better content, such as Ahrefs Tool Guide: Using Content Explorer for E-Commerce.
2. Pageviews.
This metric is very popular, but it doesn’t always give a realistic picture of the volume of traffic on your website. Pageviews mean how many times your webpage loads or reloads, regardless of whether 1,000 users or a single visitor generated that volume.
It’s the opposite of page visits, which measure how many individual people come to your website. Either way, it is an important metric to track. A high number of page views confirms that a certain article (or product page, in the case of e-commerce) is attracting more attention from users.
3. Shares and comments.
The most popular criterion for measuring engagement is to see the number of shares and comments on your website on social media. It’s a much more important number to track than the number of followers. Especially today when likes on social networks have become a fast and dynamic form of communication.
But it also has its downside: lots of likes don’t always mean that all the users clicked on your content. Sometimes they just liked the image or the first sentence.
4. Time on-page.
A visitor can reach your page by pure accident and leaves seconds later. That’s why tracking the “time on page” is even more important than just considering the total number of page visits or views.
This is the actual time people spend on your website looking at a particular content or page. The longer, the more important and useful these users found your content. But if the time is too short, maybe they were only attracted by a title or photo.
Use Google Analytics to find out what content on your webpage people are more or less involved with, and start re-evaluating your approach.
5. Bounce rate.
This criterion is linked to the previous one. After all, bounce rate is the total number of visitors that arrived at your site for whatever reason (usually the famous “click-bait”) and left after a short time.
A very high bounce rate is a bad sign when you want your users to spend more time on your site, interacting with content and visiting other pages.
On the other hand, it can also be evidence that visitors come to your website and quickly find the product or answers they are looking for.
6. Scroll depth.
This is a relatively new metric that also helps you understand your website’s bounce rate. Scroll depth can reveal important data about visitor behavior by measuring how far they scroll down. If they scroll too little, they didn’t get past the title. But if they scroll to the end, it’s because they have a real interest in the content.
According to SEO experts, a scroll depth of 50 percent is good for content with 1,250 words. For longer articles (over 2,000 words), the ideal would be to aim for 75 percent– otherwise, you are not able to keep your visitors’ attention.
Understand the behavior of your visitors.
Until a few years ago, all you had to do was have a website for your company, and the magic would happen by itself. Today everyone is on the internet, including your competitors, and it is necessary to compete for users’ attention in an ocean of sites and information.
It’s not enough to check just one of the criteria presented above. A metric alone makes no sense. You need to track several numbers and percentages to get a more realistic picture of the behavior of your website visitors.
It may seem like a lot of work, but these insights will be precious in understanding what is attracting users and why. Then you can use the data to convert more visitors into loyal customers.
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