It’s really too bad that Roget’s Thesaurus does not have a better word for “engagement” when in comes to measuring the overall effectiveness of websites and landing pages to excite and enthrall web visitors. We tend to overuse the word a lot, but it’s only because “engage” is one of the easiest terms to describe the success or failure of digital content; a website, a video, a blog post, a tweet, a banner ad, etc.. Twenty five years ago companies could put up billboards, place a listing in the yellow pages or run a full page ad in a local newspaper, but the means to measure the customer attention to those mediums was, and still is, less than an exact science.
Since most of our clients depend upon either lead generation results or e-commerce sales (or both) for their business success, those metrics tend to be the end results executives focus on. But we’ve found that improving engagement metrics for websites consistently improve the end results along the way. So while tangible results, like lead counts and online sales volume will dominate ROI calculations, measuring the engagement of your web visitors plays a critical role in your overall success. Here are the five fundamental ways to measure visitor engagement for your websites or landing pages:
Dwell Time / Session Duration: Measuring the length of time an average visitor spends on your website, or even on a specific page can tell us a lot about that content. Pages that contain videos or many paragraphs of text (like blogs posts!), may have dwell times that are measured in minutes as opposed to seconds. Other pages designed work as traffic directors, getting your visitors to where they want to be, may have dwell times that average just a few seconds. When we review our client’s web analytics monthly, we are looking for the highest trafficked pages that are both above and below par in order to continually increase the average amount of time visitors spend with us. Historically, the more you can increase the dwell time for your visitors, the more successful we are likely to be with “conversions” – whether that’s measured as leads, online sales, subscriptions, followers or some other specific call to action.
Bounce Rate: This is the measurement of a single-page session with no additional actions taken. This means a visitor reached one of your pages (not necessarily your home page) and either clicked ‘back’ or closed the tab on your website. Their expectations of what you would be showing and what they saw were out of alignment. A visitor may have taken two seconds to take no action or they may take two minutes, but the bottom line for a bounce rate is they visited just one page and did NOTHING – other than leave. Typically, for consumer facing websites, targeting an average bounce rate in the range of 25%-35% would be indicative of a well designed, fairly engaging website with good content that is likely to keep your target demographic… “engaged”. For landing pages, where visitors can only take ONE action (like completing a contact form), average bounce rates will be dramatically higher. It stands to reason that if you have a landing page that has a bounce rate of 90% then your lead conversion rate should be very close to 10% (see below for more details on Conversion Rates).
Exit Rate: When looking at the individual pages of your website, pages that show the highest Exit Rate percentages are historically the point where most of your visitors conclude their website visit. It’s a measurement of each visitor session and tracking the point (page) where people have stopped engaging with your website. It’s different from Bounce Rate because an Exit Rate requires prior actions to have been taken; they have visited other pages and clicked on your website links or navigation to have established themselves as an engaged visitor. Pay close attention to your web pages that have both high Exit Rates and high Bounce Rates, month after month, as these are the most clear points of departure for your web visitors and should be adjusted to keep visitors engaged longer.
Pages Per Session / Visitor: If your company has invested thousands building a website with 24 pages of content, but your average Pages/Session ratio 2.4, that means an average visitor is missing out on about 90% of the content that’s been created. Similar to dwell times, the higher your average pages per visitor ratio, the better for overall results, but it needs to be measured within context to how many pages of publicly accessible content your website actually has. A simple website, with just five to seven pages of content should rarely expect to see a Pages/Session ratio much above a 3.0, whereas other websites could easily run average pages per session results into double digits if the navigation is apparent and the pages are genuinely engaging.
Conversion Rate: When it comes to determining the true effectiveness of any website, the holy grail tends to be the most obvious end result expected from web visitors; for our clients this is usually online sales or lead submissions. While most analytics platforms tend to refer to this as a “Goal” we prefer the term “conversion” since an anonymous web visitor has converted into a known customer (sale) or prospect (lead). The ratio, between visitors and the resulting goal(s) is referred to as a Conversion Ratio. If it takes 1,000 monthly web visitors to generate 30 leads, you have a conversion ratio of 3% for your website or landing page. Historically, landing pages tend to have higher conversion rates over websites since there’s really only ONE action for a landing page visitor to take, whereas websites have many pages for people to engage with, which occasionally hinders the sale or lead conversion process. However, the quality of leads from websites tends to be better because candidates are more informed or educated as a result of having visited several web pages before submitting their contact details. Once you have established “Goals” within your web analytics software, you can easily measure Conversion Rates by traffic source, geography, mobile technology, ad campaign, age bracket and many more variables to help continuously improve your online sales or lead generation efforts.
These five engagement factors are by no means the only ways to determine whether your website is effective or not, but they make up the core of what we consistently review with every FranFocus client. Each month our clients receive an Executive Summary document that covers these factors at a high level and includes summaries of any expenditures we might have with outside pay-per-click traffic platforms like Google or Facebook. We also provide a private Video Briefing, typically 10-15 minutes long that is a page by page review of the monthly Executive Summary and includes our recommendations and objectives for continued improvements going forward. These recommendations can include adjustments to pages, changes to improve organic search engine optimization (SEO) and tactics to increase overall conversion rates. If you would like a complimentary (and confidential) analytics review into how well your existing website is performing, please complete the “Contact” form found on this page: Please put the words, “Complimentary Analytics Review” into the Message field.
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