Website User Engagement: 4 Reasons to Measure It

Website visitor engagement can be measured in many ways, but in general, it refers to how frequently and in what ways your existing and potential customers are interacting with your website. If you want to improve the effectiveness of your content marketing over time, tracking user engagement should be part of your content marketing strategy, for at least four reasons:

1. It tells you whether your content is resonating with your audience, helping you to understand what’s working and what isn’t. When you compare the content of one blog post to another, or compare the performance of different product listings, you can draw inferences about what kind of information your customers value most and how best to present that information. Because providing useful information is part and parcel of any successful content marketing strategy, you should play close attention to this information.
2. It helps you understand where in the buying cycle your website visitors fall. If you’re getting a lot of engagement with your basic, “how to”-type content, for example, your website visitors probably haven’t done much research on your product or service yet. So it might make sense to create even more content that gets people into your funnel early in the buying process, and continue to target that group with helpful information. When they’re ready to buy, you’ll already have their attention and you will be well-positioned for a sale.
3. It lets you know which content you should be boosting. Which content should be marked as “featured” on your blog, and displayed in a prominent place on your site? Which content should you pay to get in front of new audiences on social media, or in front of your current audience via retargeted ads? If you boost organic content that already performs well in your paid advertisements, you’ll maximize your advertising ROI.
4. It gives you an SEO boost. Web pages that see lower engagement levels tend to rank lower in Google, decreasing the chances that your content will ever be seen in the first place. Over time, Google has adjusted its search algorithm to pay more attention to searcher behavior. After all, what better way is there to gauge whether a search result meets searchers’ needs than to pay attention to the engagement levels of the searchers themselves?

If you aren’t yet tracking website engagement in Google Analytics or another analytics program, I hope I’ve convinced you to start. Next week, we’ll look at some of the most important user-engagement metrics to track and what they mean for your content marketing strategy. Sign up for our weekly email – we’ll let you know when that blog is posted to our site.