How Understanding User Engagement Can Lead to Success

While marketers continue to focus on reaching more customers and improving SEO strategies, it’s user engagement that can shine the light on what is and isn’t succeeding.

Either customers are engaging with your brand, website, or content, or they’re not.

Engagement marketing, then, needs to be at the forefront of everything you do, not only to improve the user experience but also to aid your SEO efforts.

It may just be the measure of success you are looking for and, more importantly, a guide for where you need to go from here and what you need to change.

By measuring user engagement, you gain an understanding of the value placed upon your product, service, or brand and also whether you are providing an experience worthy of your customers.

Want to know more? Keep reading!

What is User Engagement?

User engagement is the all-inclusive term for the various interactions the users have with your brand, website, content, or app.

Going one step deeper, user engagement can be described as the action taken by visitors upon experiencing your brand or content.

These actions can be log-ins, sign-ups, downloads, clicks, likes, shares, or product purchases.

Yet, how you define user engagement may be different from others. It involves identifying which interactions are most meaningful or valuable to your brand.

Why Does User Engagement Matter?

User engagement is a hot button for digital marketing teams today. Rightly so, because user engagement drives ROI, conversions, and profitability.

It tells you how the users value your product or services.

User engagement is also a prime way to assess the effectiveness of your messaging and branding strategy and activities.

If engagement is low, it can alert you that your content is of low quality to users or you are targeting the wrong audience.

Essentially, user engagement matters because it can:

• Measure marketing campaign effectiveness.
• Provide informative data on how visitors interact with your website, content, or app.
• Serve as a predictor of profitability.

The more highly engaged users are, the more likely they are to return, buy, and share with others information about your product or service.

Measuring user engagement can also provide clues to your churn rate.

Churn rate provides data on negative interactions with you, such as unsubscribing or silencing notices.

Finally, user engagement is important to your SEO strategy.

The longer a visitor stays on your website, and the more they interact with your content, the more search engine algorithms notice and treat you as a trustworthy and authoritative site, boosting you in the rankings.

How to Measure User Engagement

Not only is tracking and measuring user engagement critical to your ROI and bottom line, but it is also essential to ensure you are providing the best possible user experience and customer satisfaction.

What exactly, though, do you need to measure?

Your business and brand are unique, and only you can determine what successful user engagement is for your company.

Is it signing up for a newsletter, following you on social media, or making a purchase? It may be clicking on links to other internal pages or requesting more information.

Once you identify this, one beneficial way to measure engagement is to break it down into three categories.

• Total Users: those who have visited your website or downloaded an app.
• Active Users: those taking some type of meaningful action on your site or app.
• Engaged Users: those who have taken the more significant actions.

By dividing users into these categories, you can gain insight and an understanding of how much value you provide to each. 

From there, determine ways to convert them to the next level. For example, what will turn an active user into a more engaged user.

Other available metrics to help you measure user engagement include:

Pageviews

Look at the number of pageviews within a set amount of time. How many times is a page loaded and reloaded? How many visitors are leaving your site after only viewing one page?

Bounce Rate

What is the frequency with which visitors pop onto your website, then leave shortly afterward without clicking on any other links or taking further action?

Time on Site

How long are users spending on your website?

Time on Page

How long are visitors spending on a page?

Conversions

How many users or visitors take some type of conversion action, such as signing up for your email list or buying your product? Conversions show that users are engaging with your content and you are doing something right.

Popular Content

Which content is eliciting the highest engagement from users?

Churn Rate

In addition to these, you will want to track negative interactions. Those negative interactions may not be the same for everyone, so define them for your brand first. These may include such things as app deletions, unsubscribes, or plan downgrades.

The value of looking at these churn rates and identifying what is causing such disengagement can help you find ways to make improvements.

This list is not all-inclusive, of course, and you may prefer other measurements to help you determine user engagement for your particular brand.

How Can You Improve User Engagement?

You can improve user engagement by finding ways to keep visitors more engaged and interacting with your brand, website, content, or app.

Here are actions you can take to accomplish this.

1. Better the User Experience

Bettering your visitors’ experience on your website or app is the key to improving user engagement.

The more positive experiences they have, the deeper the connection with your brand and a more willingness to act.

Evaluate your website regularly to determine what might be stopping visitors from taking action or driving them away too quickly. 

What features do visitors seldom engage with? Why is that?

You may need to move the CTA, change a button’s shape or size, or reconfigure the layout to make it more user-friendly.

Perhaps visitors are abandoning their shopping carts once they find out they have to create an account to purchase. Remedy this by allowing for guest checkouts or offering third-party payment options such as through PayPal.

Also, keep website navigation in mind. If visitors can’t easily find what they are looking for, they will go elsewhere.

Other things to look for include page loading speeds. Users become impatient the longer they have to wait to see their chosen content.

2. Provide Engaging Content

Let’s face it. Consumers have a lot of information to wade through online these days.

As a result, you have to be precise at providing content they find useful, compelling, and engaging for you to even get noticed, much less entice engagement.

To develop the right content marketing strategy, determine who your targeted audience is, create buyer personas, and build your content around them.

Combine different types of content to stir interest. Go beyond offering more opportunities to read a blog post or watch a video.

Prompt them to engage with the use of interactive content, for example. It gives your visitors a way to be involved in their decision-making.

Include calculators, polls, questionnaires, infographics, or other content that matches with what you offer. You may even want to incorporate gamification into your content offerings.

Build trust and authority by creating content users can download for free.

Also, use analytics to monitor your content and how its users perceive it, then refine it in accordance with the insights you gain.

3. Go for Personalization

Personalizing your content can lead to higher engagement rates.

By putting in the effort to use more personalization tactics, you make the user feel welcome and a part of something bigger. 

You acknowledge them as an important user, which speaks to their emotions. In turn, they will choose to engage with you more frequently.

You can even go further with hyper-personalization if it fits with your offerings.

4. Upgrade your Customer Service

Customer service continues to be essential when it comes to engagement with your brand.

Fortunately, today, you have more ways to interact with users, including live chat support and real-time assistance, which leads to faster response times.

A bonus of upgrading your customer service is a boost in reputation, customer loyalty, and trustworthiness.

5. Refine Your Strategy

Take all your measurement data and put it to good use.

Learn from both the analytics and from your customers. Send out surveys and ask for feedback to learn more.

Following the data collection, identify ways to revise and fine-tune areas of your engagement strategy.

Seek answers to such questions as:

• What is most popular on your website, or what sees the most interaction?
• What headlines receive the most attention?
• What keeps viewers engaged with your social media channel the longest? Is it a certain type of video?

Learn everything you can about your visitors and use it to make the user experience better and boost engagement.

Wrap Up

When it comes to creating a successful, long-term marketing strategy, you need to know how users are responding to what you have on offer and, in particular, your content. 

Tracking and measuring user engagement is the way to know what is working and what needs re-evaluation and improvement.

There are several ways you can improve user engagement, such as by bettering the user experience, offering more engaging content, adding personalization, upgrading your customer service, and fine-tuning your strategy with what you learn. 

By taking action, not only will you see an increase in engagement, but customers will gravitate more and more to you, becoming loyal customers in less time.

To boost user engagement even more, learn how interactive content can help.