Last Updated on April 17, 2018
Engaging the users on your website will be possible by knowing the peak interests of your visitors and adding interesting points in your website content regularly in accordance with the visitors’ demand. Businesses that are dependent upon inventory regularly attempt to engage customers by making regular changes in their products and adding new products to attract new visitors and customers.
Companies that sell products with more frequency engage clients and try to keep their business at the top of the ones the customers look for. You should offer the products and content according to the peak interests of the users to withstand the competition as the number of websites keep on increase day by day.
You may get confused by the terms Key Performance Indicators and metrics related to the interests of the website users. These terms are often used with the same meaning but actually, they are not the same. These terms refer to the parameters that calculate the users’ engagement on certain websites.
In fact, the metrics do not have any impact on the actual business on your website. To get a clear idea about this, the term bounce rate does not have any impact on your website business as it has nothing to do with the direct business of your website.
Coming to the KPIs or Key Performance Indicators have the direct impact on your website business. Website conversion rate is one of such KPIs. Website conversion rate is otherwise called average order value.
You cannot measure the results of engagement activities on your website directly. Because you cannot control the happenings outside your website and most of the activities behind the engagement of users on your website occur outside your website and the characteristics of most of these activities are unpredictable. Here, we can have a look at some of the internal and external parameters to measure the impact of visitors’ engagement. Some of these metrics are effective ways to analyze the impact of visitors’ engagement on your website to enhance your business. These metrics are helpful to appeal the customers towards your website content.
Measuring the Impact of Engagement
Some internal metrics measure the effectiveness of engagement of visitors on your website whereas external metrics requires the measurement of visitors’ engagement on other platforms or websites.
Internal Metrics
The internal metrics are parameters that indicate the visitors’ interaction with your website. Some of such metrics are as follows:
Average time on site
In general, if visitors spend a long time on your website, it shows that they are engaged on your site and like to invest in your product. But to measure the actual impact of visitors’ engagement on your website, you need to review the analytics by conducting usability tests and studies to know whether they show genuine interest to invest in your product or not. Because of the visitors’ engagement on your website sometimes the result of their confusion regarding your website content. Google Analytics is an excellent source of statistics helpful to evaluate the visitors’ performance on your website. These statistics help you to check whether the users engaged in your website wish to become your investors or not. Sometimes, these results may deceive you. For instance,
The formula to calculate the average time on page= Time on page/(page views-exits)
Though there is a certain formula to calculate the average time on page, you can achieve exact results within confident intervals, you have to consider the following terms.
- Time on the page: This parameter will be accurate if the page is not the last page on your website.
- The high rates of page exits indicate that your page cannot achieve the required average page time. For a healthy average time on page, your page should have low exit rates. Google Analytics takes the total number of users into consideration to calculate average time spent on a particular page.
From the above example, we can see some of the pages have exit rates above 90 percent. That means you have to fix some issues related to such pages.
If you consider another example like,
, the average page time is above two minutes. That means the average time on that website is reliable. From that image, we can observe that the website is getting the tremendous response and the average time on that site is stable.
Pages per visit
The number of pages on a website the user navigates per visit is a good parameter to measure visitors’ engagement on your page. This metric depends on the type of your website. Generally, with an increase in conversion rates, the pages per visit will show a growth if you consider e-commerce websites. Some customers go through 9 to 13 pages per visit on a website. The number of page views will be high in case of content-based websites.
Social media Interaction
Social sharing tools play a crucial role to improve the traffic of the website. Some websites provide mechanisms that enable the users to share the content on social networking sites.
By using online social interaction analytics, you can measure the number of times the viewers navigate to the social buttons on your website if you use social buttons on your website. Facebook likes and Twitter tweets help you out in this context.
Social interactions provide reports of social analytics that help to fabricate a dependable framework to enhance your website traffic. On the other hand, event tracking is used to calculate the rate of general user interactions. The social analytics allow you to get a set of reports useful to compare multiple networks. If you do not have strong social interactions with your users till date, you should go through the following research conducted by eMarketer which proves that people buy from websites they often visit on social media channels. 
As you can see that nearly 70% of Gen Xers, 51% of baby boomers, and 60% of Millennials state that they prefer to buy things from channels they often visit through social media.
Consider this link to know more about increasing the social media engagement of visitors.
The research by EntreprenuerCountryGlobal states about some of the ways to optimize your social media interaction. 10 of such ways are
- Blogging
- Regular interactions with customers
- Overall interaction
- Utilize the big three social networking sites
- Don’t ignore other social networking sites
- Forums
- Social login
- Variations in content
- Reviews
- Rewards
Mitchell Sentzener, CEO of social media examiner gives an explanation about some of the important points about how it is more important to make people share your content on social media than just clicking on the link. In fact, the number of shares of your content increases the number of followers to your product or website. If a person shares your content, it means he/she likes to get engaged to your content on social media.
External metrics useful to track external visitors’ engagement or visitors’ engagement outside your website
Links are helpful to make money through your website at the maximum levels. Links can be called the currency of the website. The high- quality links that support your website help you to make your website more authenticated. People may follow the links on your website with positive or negative impressions or purposes.
The only thing you can do to monetize your back-links is, just assure that you provide the relevant content to the website you link to your content. You should give importance to the reliability and relevance of the inbound links to your content. These steps help to minimize the risk of penalization of your website by Google. You can take the help of several tools like Open Site Explorer(offers free version), Majestic Seo and SEMRush.
The Number of External Mentions
With the tremendous growth of social media, a lot of discussions can be made about your website or business outside your website. You need to track these discussions to improve external engagement of visitors on your website. One of the examples to illustrate the need to track the external mentions of your website can be seen at the link.
How to engage your website visitors?
Many budding companies and entrepreneurs focus on gaining new customers instead of keeping up the existing customers. However, even the top companies should not let the existing customers go. Customer retention plays a pivotal role in the healthy stature of a business. Research by Bain&Co., says that 5% growth in customer retention shows 75% growth in the company’s profitability.
According to a survey by Gartner, 80% of future revenue for the business comes from 20% of existing customers.
Another startling fact about customer retention is revealed by Lee Resource Inc. The statistics state that attracting new customers costs the company 5 percent more than keeping up the existing customers.
Some of the solutions for customer retention and engaging the visitors with your website are as follows.
- Share your knowledge on social media
Most of the companies, including the top ones hesitate to share the knowledge or statistics related to their business on social media or on their own website. But wise businessmen follow another strategy. Sharing the knowledge online will be helpful to your business for sure. Online communities and forums help to attract the customers towards your business. Sharing of knowledge through posts or e-books introduces you to a wider range of clients. For example, if you run an e-commerce website, if you share some popular product reviews on your site, the customers will look for your product reviews as well as to purchase your products.
- Minimal Page loading time
The ideal page loading time should be less than 4 seconds. For instance, you can run different pages of your website using this tool. Always try to keep track of first byte load time. Try to keep it minimal in all the possible conditions. Have a look at the illustration given in the link
- Readability of the content
Readability of the content is an important factor to engage your visitors. Keep an ideal amount of white space and scannable format. Your content should be easy to read and the font size should be legible.
- Importance of web copy
You should create an attractive and engaging web copy of your content. The copywriters that can make engaging web pages are often paid huge salaries. You should maintain balance on the focus about your product as well as present your product attractive to your clients.
- Use of high- quality pictures
A picture speaks more than 1000 words. Use high- quality pictures of your product to present on your website. Zoom functionality is another important factor in the regards to e-commerce websites. Instead of stock images, you may use images of the products created by your own staff to publish on your website.
- Videos
Videos convey the information more effectively than pictures. You can post demonstrations or informative videos related to your product or website and you can indeed use videos to answer the questions by the customers. For instance, you can ask your customers to post videos about using your products to improve the user interaction.
- Customer reviews
Display the customer reviews of your products online. This step makes your website more transparent. This measure helps you to engage the visitors on your website. Amazon.com is the best example of this measure. They reveal that a majority of customer reviews on their products with regular updates. These reviews may appeal customers to purchase your products.
- Suggesting relevant items
Suggesting relevant items to the products on your website is the wise strategy to enhance external visitors’ engagement. Publishing extra content related to your product persuades most of the customers to purchase your product. For example, display related pages or blogs related to the page or blog the user is going through. This measure helps to enhance the number of visitors to your blog or your website. 
- Communication through e-mail
Communicating with the customers through e-mails is a better idea to keep up existing customers. E-mail is the effective means of communication with potential customers.
You should consider following things to communicate with your customers through e-mails.
- The type of the content you want to publish through email
- The language of the email
- The frequency of sending emails
- Live Chats
Providing live chats for the customers is a sophisticated way of improving your business. You can select from a wide-range of live chat companies. The data tested through live-chat enhances your business for sure. You should remember the following points to provide live chat to your customers.
- Time of live chat
- Availability of efficient staff to answer the questions by customers
- The process to get back the customers to live chat in case if no one attends the live chat at the particular time
- Personalized website
A personalized website makes users engage with your website for a longer time. To provide your clients the customized experience, you can
- Use the technology to decide the products to be displayed on your website
- Use the website design to help out the visitors to choose the product related to their requirements
- Display the options or products to the visitors related to the current product
- Adding “fix this recommendation” option to the products to make customers choose the relevant products at an ease
- Mobile edition of the website
According to Google, the access to the internet is growing day by day on mobile phones than on the PCs. E-commerce sites in North America and Europe admitted that website conversions happening through mobile devices grew up to 30% and 50% respectively. The features of mobile website edition should be appealing as well as highly responsive.
- Events
Host events to interact with users on virtual or physical stages help you to increase website conversions. Events through Google Hangouts, webinars are helpful to effective interaction with potential customers.
- Usability Test
Conducting usability tests help you know the extent of users engaged with your website. User feedback plays a pivotal role to determine the quality and engaging nature of your content. You can know whether your website content is appealing or boring by usability tests. Usability tests help to analyze the pros and cons of your business or your website.
Conclusion
To conclude, this article gives you some of the solutions to keep the visitors engaged with your website. You should retain the existing customers as well as attract new customers using social media tools, analytical tools, and online programs. You should have a clear and affirmative content strategy to cope up with the competitors. By these moves, you can retain the existing customers and make them invest I you besides attracting new ones.
