Imagine you walk into a bustling cafe and after spending a few minutes glancing at the menu, you walk out without buying anything. Now, imagine a worker greeting you as you enter the cafe. On top of viewing the menu, you were given additional suggestions on the most popular food items and special offers. Your chances of buying something increase drastically. This is user engagement when translated to the digital world.

When users are engaged thoroughly, they feel connected to the experience. Whether it be through interactive content, seamless navigation, personalized features, discount pop-ups, or push notifications that say “Hey, we missed you. Come back!”. Keeping the users engaged throughout their journey from discovering the product to becoming a customer serves as the foundation of any brand.

This blog is a comprehensive guide on user engagement, trackable metrics, and how to improve them efficiently.

What is User Engagement?

Simply put, user engagement is the interaction between users and a product. The higher the interaction is, the more valuable your product is for the audience.

It is generally measured by user actions like clicks, comments, time spent on a page, etc, and highlights the relevance of your product. But there are also numerous reasons why you should consider user engagement while designing any content or product strategy.

Importance of User Engagement

User engagement is an important KPI to measure the success of any digital platform. It depicts the profitability of your business, relevance of product/service, and whether you are on track to acquire new customers and retain the existing ones.

Retention

Acquiring new customers is costlier than retaining the existing ones. Good engagement rates keep the users coming back, minimize churn, and ensure long-term profitability.

Customer Satisfaction

High user engagement makes users feel connected with the brand. It fosters a positive relationship and improves customer experience and loyalty. A loyal customer is more likely to become the brand’s advocate giving a competitive advantage in saturated markets.

Revenue Growth

A highly engaged user base directly correlates with revenue growth. Whether through subscriptions, in-app purchases, or ad interactions, engaged users contribute significantly to monetization efforts. Platforms that engage users well tend to see higher lifetime value (LTV) from each customer.

Feedback

When users are connected with your brand, they are more likely to share their experiences, feedback, pain points, and insights that are usually hard to acquire.

Personalization

High engagement enables effective data collection that can be utilized to understand user behavior, further product enhancements, fix bugs, and personalization. The more personalized the experience, the higher the engagement, creating a perfect loop of customer journey.

We get it, user engagement now sounds like a great low-hanging fruit, but there are several factors that can come in your way of achieving commendable engagement. 

Factors that affect user engagement

User engagement is more than just ad clicks and traffic. It determines the way audience perceives your brand, your product value, and your impact. Understanding the factors that affect these engagement metrics can help you decipher a fool-proof content and marketing strategy.

Content Quality

There’s no doubt that the quality of content plays a major role in getting higher user engagement. According to Google guidelines, the content that ranks on top of SERP is usually intent-based, well-researched and unique, has credible sources, and is mobile-friendly.

The absence of good-quality content and relevance can lead to disengagement and high bounce rates.

Personalization

A user can get a generic experience anywhere on the internet. There is no shortage of information, services, and products in the digital space and the competition is insanely high. One factor that distinguishes the best among the crowd is personalization. If you spend more time understanding the user behavior, needs, and trends, you can cater your experience to target the specific requirements of the user and offer a more engaging experience.

Social Interaction

The CTAs you encounter while scrolling through various landing pages are not just for show. They enable users to interact with the content and also take relevant actions. Strategic CTA button placements, easy accessibility to like, comment and share features, and timely pop-ups/notifications add to enhanced user engagement.

Gamification

Humans are naturally drawn towards a community experience. Gamifying the user experience with rewards, points, or badges can create a sense of community and motivate users to engage more actively and repeatedly.

User engagement metrics to track

User engagement metrics are quantifiable indicators crucial to determining the success and failure of your product. It offers deep insights into user experience and helps measure the level of interest, involvement, and satisfaction users have with your product.

The table below highlights the most important metrics and their components that add to a holistic user experience.

User Activity Metrics

As the name suggests, it's the activities that a user performs after landing on your page.

Pageviews

Perhaps the most common metric to measure the traffic on your site. It depicts the total number of people that have found your page. A higher pageview signifies a strong SEO presence and that your content produces enough value for people to visit again.

Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users (DAU/WAU/MAU)

The most popular way to gauge user engagement is by tracking active users. DAU (Daily Active Users), WAU (Weekly Active Users), and MAU (Monthly Active Users) indicate how many users are active within a given time frame.

This metric can differ based on the nature of your offerings. For example, Fitness apps are an everyday necessity. For them, tracking DAU is the more effective. On the other hand, travel apps might like to track MAU given their apps are used for a very specific use case.

Stickiness

Stickiness defines the effectiveness of your product/service. The more users are active within a week or a month, the higher the stickiness is.

It’s important to track product stickiness as it highlights whether the users are regularly discovering your product and at what frequency they are returning.

Tips to improve user activity

1. Good user experience

Provide a seamless experience to your visitors. A website that loads quickly, has a balanced amount of images and text, does not display too many ads, and pop-ups are also limited, all of these add to an enhanced user experience. If the experience of first-time visitors is good, they are likely to engage deeply and regularly.

2. Accessible content

The key to making your content accessible and among the top choices for your audience is to make it easily shareable. 

Example:

Apna, a professional networking platform, utilizes a community-like feed to share resources with users. These resources and blogs are simultaneously listed on the web, increasing the blog traffic and also making it easier for people to read and share it.

User Session Metrics

It’s the measure of the time an average user spends on the site.

Time on Page

This user engagement metric measures the time a user spends on a specific page. It is an excellent metric to quantify the user interest.

To understand it better, let’s say your blog is around 1500 words, and users are exiting after 5 seconds. It’s clear that your blog isn’t interesting and impactful enough and the content needs revamping.

Bounce Rate

A subset of time on page, bounce rate indicates the percentage of visitors that exit after visiting one page.

It’s an important user engagement metric to track because it reflects how interesting and readable your content is. If people are churning after a few seconds, that means you need to improve either the content, layout, design or all of them.

Top Exit Pages

This metric measures the last pages users might visit before exiting the site. Such metrics are important to calculate to understand which pages are creating the least amount of interest among the viewers.

Subsequently, if you are navigating users toward a desired action (buyer’s journey) like a Contact Us page or a form, and the user exits without completing the action is a clear indication that your page lacks impact.

Tips to improve user session metrics

1. Rethink engagement tools

While CTAs, pop-ups, and forms help boost user engagement, they can also hinder the viewing experience.

Too many forced actions can overwhelm users and might distract them from the main purpose - providing value.

2. Interlinking

A good way to redirect users toward the desired action is by interlinking relevant pages on the site. This also increases the click-through rate that too without pop-ups and CTAs.

3. Reviews

Reviews and testimonials are a good way of engaging users and increasing their time on page. Additionally, they establish credibility and naturally drive users to take action.

Example:

Such examples can be found across industries. E-commerce apps like Amazon and travel apps such as Airbnb utilize reviews to engage users and influence conversions.

Feature Engagement Metrics

This metric is used to track how frequently users are interacting within the app or site. This is critical to determine the effectiveness of the product and whether users are influenced to complete their buying journey.

Pages per Session 

This user engagement metric tracks the pages a user visits in one session. Unlike user session metrics where the user activity is measured per page, in pages per session, the entire path of the user is calculated.

This is a great way to assess whether the navigation of your site is strong.

Page/Scroll Depth

This measures how far the user scrolls on your page before exiting. This is a great way to pinpoint the weaknesses of the pages/sites.

This metric is generally based on two factors - the readability of the page and the interest of the user. If your content meets both requirements, your page depth will be high.

Unique Visitors

Just like the word unique suggests, this metric helps in tracking how many new users visit your page during a specified period.

This is different than pageviews because unlike it, unique visitor metric focuses on tracking new visitors rather than the old repeating ones.

Tips to increase feature engagement metrics

1. Relevant content

I have mentioned it above as well that nothing is more important than content to increase user engagement. With an attention span of barely a few seconds, it’s important to provide instant and enough value to users. Keeping your content relevant, interesting, and easy to read can help improve feature engagement.

2. Smooth navigation

Make sure your site or app is optimized to provide a seamless navigation experience. Clear CTAs and actions, fast loading times, and relevant interlinking help enhance user pathways.

Example:

Amazon app is the most straightforward e-commerce app to exist. Every action, every feature is clearly defined and visible. Their website is equally effective in driving users from one page to another without losing them in the loading time.

User Journey Metrics

The final stages of user engagement are judged on the basis of the actions user take. User journey metrics track various KPIs that highlight whether the final stage of the marketing funnel has been fulfilled or not.

Conversion Rate

A user is deemed converted when they take a desired final action - purchasing, downloading, contacting, or engaging. Conversion rate is the percentage of those converted users.

Retention Rate

Once the user has converted, the brand’s job is to keep them coming back. Retention rate is the percentage of repeated users who continue to engage.

This metric highlights the lifetime value of your product. A good retention rate builds loyal customers and results in ultimate user engagement.

Abandonment Rate

This is the percentage of people who started a conversion activity but didn’t complete it. A good example is a user who adds items to the cart but doesn’t complete the transaction.

A higher percentage of abandonment rate indicates an obstruction or error in the final stages of conversion.

Tips to increase user journey metrics

1. Communication Mediums

Provide simple means for your users to communicate with your team in case a problem arises. Ticketing or emailing can be a tedious task for a user to follow, ultimately leaving them to discontinue engaging or conversion activity.

2. Push Notifications

Notifying or reminding people to complete the final action is necessary to nudge them into taking action.

3. Introduce Chat

The most effective way to increase conversion rate and retention rate, while simultaneously reducing abandonment rates is introducing chat or chatbot into the app/site. When users can easily chat with the team about the errors, discounts, or anything that helps them facilitate the process, they feel more confident to go through with the conversion stage.

Example:

Zomato, BlinkIt, and countless other apps have integrated chatbots that initially take care of the communication process. With prompt response to the user query/concern and transition to human support when needed, such features aid to enhanced user engagement.

Final Thoughts

User engagement is critical to business success. Tracking essential metrics helps businesses stay updated on user activities and take strategic actions to enhance user experience.

Good relevant content is the cornerstone for high user engagement. Keeping track of user behavior, being proactive, and tailoring users’ journeys to meet their needs can help further enhance engagement.