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Measuring user engagement can give you actionable insight into how your users view and use your product.
These insights can give you invaluable information on what’s resonating within your product with your users and what isn’t, and help you shape your roadmap going forward.
Whether it’s figuring out which functionality is being used the most or pinpointing exactly when potential users are clicking away from your homepage, user engagement metrics are key to helping you shape your product.
But there are so many different ways to measure and track user engagement that it can be incredibly overwhelming. So, we reached out to over fifty leading experts in the tech industry to ask them how they track user engagement and compiled all their answers here.
Don’t have time to read through fifty responses? We get it. After parsing through everything they had to say, we put together a quick-hit list of the top 14 user engagement metrics that our experts used and broke down each one for you. We’ll define each metric, explain why it’s important to track, and show you how to calculate it to make it as easy as possible for you to track user engagement.
Based on the expert responses, here is a shortlist of the most popular user engagement metrics to track. We’ll dive deeper into each metric in the section below.
Want to go deeper into these metrics? Look no further! Here’s what all of our experts had to say about how they track user engagement.
User activity is typically measured within some temporal window: Daily Active Users (DAU), Weekly Active Users (WAU), or Monthly Active Users (MAU). Measuring user activity by using at least one of these metrics can show you how many unique users are actively using your product during a particular interval.
When calculating user activity, it’s important to determine what your team defines as an “active” user. Is it when they log in to your product? Is it when they click on a specific attribute or open a specific page? Once your team has defined what an active user is for your specific product, then you can find how many daily, weekly, or monthly users you have.
It can be helpful for your team to know how “sticky” your product is. That is to say, how often are your users returning to use your product? We can find this by dividing your Daily Active Users by your Monthly Active Users.
Stickiness = DAU / MAU
So, if you have fifty Daily Active Users and a hundred Monthly Active Users, then your stickiness percentage is 50%. Your average user is using your product about half time, or 15 days out of a 30 day month.
Similar to DAU or MAU is measuring engagement during a user’s first week in your product. If a user isn’t directly engaging with your product within the first week that they gain access to it, it’s highly likely they won’t be coming back. Tracking week one engagement can also reveal any kinks in the onboarding process you may have, or show how intuitive your product really is to a new user.
Likely, you define an active user as someone who does more than just log in to your product, however tracking the number of logins can still be helpful. I mean, they can’t be using your product if they aren’t logging in, right?
Deciding whether to track logins on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis will depend on your product and how often your average user should be logging in. After deciding on what works best for you and your team, tracking logins can help you spot if a user is trending towards less engagement with your product or isn’t using it as frequently.
Segmenting your user retention rates can be very helpful to see when the dropoff point in your specific product seems to occur. Looking at user retention after day one, day seven, and day thirty can help you identify when users are leaving your product. A typical user retention curve looks like this:
Source: https://medium.com/@kangeugine/how-to-get-users-and-grow-alex-schultz-f2c58f1cd997
The goal of looking at user retention in this way is to improve user engagement at all points of their experience within your product and move that curve upwards.
Another useful metric is looking at how long your users are staying in your app. A user can open your product a hundred times, but if they’re only staying in it for a few seconds or even minutes, they likely aren’t getting enough value out of it. It is important to note here, however, that this metric will be totally dependent on your product and how it’s designed to be used. If you are a weather app, then a user staying on your app for longer than a minute or so might actually show that your product is too confusing, since it shouldn’t take them that long to check the weather.
This is why it’s important to measure the average amount of time a user stays in your app. That way, you have a benchmark to compare a single user to, and you can more easily see if a user is spending too much or too little time on your app.
New customers are great to have, and increasing the top of your funnel with new users can be crucial to growing your business. But if users are trying your product once and never coming back, then that means that they’re not seeing the value in your product or are not fully understanding it. This can be a huge problem as it will increase your churn rate and can stunt your company’s growth.
Tracking the number of users returning to your product shows you how many users are getting value from your product versus those who aren’t. You can then target those users who aren’t getting as much value out of your product with additional messaging or educational materials. If you have a low percentage of returning users, you may want to reach out to those users and see why they haven’t returned or send along some helpful tips and tricks to get them to come back.
Tracking which features are used, how frequently they’re being used, and who is actually using them can all be super helpful to your team. If you have a feature that is never being used, it may indicate that users just don’t find value in it and it may be time to get rid of that functionality, which will save you and your team a ton of time and money. On the flip side, if there is a certain feature that is getting a ton of usage, it may be helpful to look into why your users find it so valuable and if you can expand on it in a certain way.
It’s also important to look at who is using which features. If you have a less popular feature, however the users who actually use it are your highest paying customers, you are likely not going to get rid of it any time soon.
NPS typically asks your users to rate on a scale from 1-10 how likely they are to recommend your product to someone else. Typically, those who rated 1-6 are considered “Detractors”, those who rated 7-8 are considered “Neutrals”, and those who rated 9-10 are considered “Promoters”. You can then find your NPS score by subtracting the percentage of “Detractors” from the percentage of “Promoters”.
NPS= % Promoters – % Detractors
So for example, if you have 68% “Promoters” and 10% “Detractors”, then you have an NPS score of 58. NPS can be a helpful metric, however it is highly speculative in nature; “How likely are you to recommend the product?” Instead, we suggest using aNPS, or Actual NPS. aNPS asks the user, “Have you already recommended the product? Why or why not?” This will give you much more actionable insight and data.
One of the most important things you can do when trying to validate your ideas for potential new features or gather information is to ask your users for feedback. After all, who knows better what your users want than your users? Having a high feedback response rate shows that your users care enough about your product to put in the time and effort to give you feedback, and can be a great indicator of a motivated user population.
Your bounce rate is the percentage of people who click away from your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can mean that your users aren’t finding value in your product, aren’t understanding your product, or aren’t engaging well with your product.
However, bounce rates can be deceiving. A user may just have a question on pricing, or need a quick refresher on a question they had, so going to just one page in your product could satisfy their need. It’s important to keep this in mind when analyzing your bounce rate.
We’ve all received customer satisfaction surveys; essentially, CSAT shows shows a user’s overall content or discontent with your product. You ask your users to rank your product on a scale (1-3, 1-5, 1-10, etc.) and then you take the sum of the scores divided by the number of respondents. While NPS measures overall satisfaction, CSAT typically measures a user’s satisfaction with a certain feature inside of your product. This metric is most effective when you use it at the exact moment they just finished using that feature during their journey through your product.
Abandonment rate is the percentage at which a user will abandon their virtual shopping cart when checking out online. You can calculate it by taking the number of abandoned carts and dividing it by the total number of users who completed the sale.
Abandonment rate = # of users who abandoned their carts / total # of users who completed the sale
There are certain actions you want your users to take within your product, whether that be opening a certain page or using a certain feature. These actions can be tracked as conversions, and you can calculate your conversion rate by taking the number of users who complete those actions and dividing it by your total number of users.
Conversion rate = # of users who completed action / total # of users
So, if you have ten users who used a new page in your product and a hundred total users, then you have a conversion rate of 10% for that new page. This metric can be super helpful in seeing how quickly your user population adopts a new feature or how much of your product they are actually using and exploring.
Baremetrics | Head of Growth
We track number of logins, sessions, number of users per account, and pageviews. We report on them about once every three months, and monitor otherwise.
Yoreevo | Co-Founder
Returning users. Our website's main goal is to acquire users and deliver enough value (via apartment listings) to get them to come back. While traffic and new users is great, if we can't convert the traffic to users and deliver enough value for the users to come back, the website isn't doing it's job. For that reason, returning users is the best engagement metric for Yoreevo. Real estate is seasonal so we try to look at it infrequently enough for it to be relevant. Monthly, comparing to the previous year to strip out seasonality usually gets the job done.
Bonjoro | Growth Manager
We track a wide range of user engagement metrics, including pre-conversion metrics like unique views, opt-ins and email engagement and in-app user engagement metrics like how many bonjoro's have they sent in the first 30 days, have they set up multiple templates etc.. We report on these metrics frequently in weekly meetings, as well as monthly reviews.
CrankWheel | CEO
Our "north star" metric, the one that we most try to increase the growth rate of and the one that we get most concerned if it's not growing as expected, is what we call "weekly engaged agents" and is counted once a week as the number of agents who had at least two screen sharing meetings using our app in the previous 7 days. We operate on a freemium model, and by requiring at least two meetings, we filter out those who may just have signed up and tried the app once, as well as extremely casual users who are unlikely to ever convert to paying customers. We find that this metric is an excellent leading indicator of paid sign-ups and revenue a few months down the line.
Referral Rock | Founder CEO Leading Product and Marketing
The main metrics we track for our users/customers (marketers running referral programs) are Daily:# Members Joined - How effective your program offer is
# Member Shares - How engaged members are in your referral program
# Referral Page Views - How compelling your offer is to the referral/friend
# Referrals Created - How many friends converted
# Rewards Issued - Unit economics related to the performance of your program
Our goal is that our customers aren't in our platform very often as they want to set and forget their programs.
The Made in America Movement | Chairman and Chief Growth Executive
Repeat visits per week and per month give us a strong indicator of the value of the offering to our customers. I'd love for any offering to be part of my customers' daily lives, but that may not always be the reality. The important thing is that customers are finding value and repeatedly using the service.
The monthly visits per month allow us to monitor usage over time, without the noise that can come from monitoring it on a daily or weekly basis. The weekly visits statistic gives us an early indicator if the usage trend is changing, but monitoring usage weekly requires much more of a subjective view based on holidays, seasonal trends, industry events, etc.
Piwik PRO | Content Marketer
As a company with a subscription component in our business model, we place a high priority on the product adoption rate. At Piwik PRO, we define it as an index that contains a number of different feature usage metrics, e.g. segments or creating custom analytics goals for site visitors. Higher adoption rates means people interact with our product and find value in it as a way to help them reach their goals. Happy users can become our long-term customers which leads to more stable revenue.
Along with the product adoption rate, each month we look into engagement metrics such as:
- Various customer satisfaction metrics e.g. NPS – sent regularly to our clients as a survey
- Active users over time – we use our analytics platform to measure that same platform’s end user sessions, clicks and user flow through our application, all evaluated for each customer
- Product and feature usage – a granular dive into the actual adoption of each feature, measured by time spent, number of sessions or number of users.
Fundera | Senior Marketing Associate
We track many engagement metrics but just a few that we focus on are page views, time on page, bounce rate, and unique visits. Pageviews track the total number of pages viewed on a site. Time on page is the average amount of time spent on individual pages. Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who visit a page and return to SERPs after viewing just that page. Unique visits are the number of visits by individual visitors. We report on all of these with Google Sheets and explanatory emails, using Google Analytics as the data source.
Text Request | Director of Marketing
As a text messaging SaaS, we look at:- Time spent using our product (time on site)
- App pages viewed
- App features used
- Message volume
We have real-time reports on all of these, and our teams dig into them as needed per account, and weekly for an overview.
iGrafx | Global Director - Product Marketing
Feedback from our customers is very important for product development and support. We utilize NPS and various other methods to gather this information. Personally I am interested also in how our content is being used, consumed and how useful it is. For this we are constantly reviewing SOV, click metrics, engagement and time on page.
Closer | VP of Marketing
For Closer, it's essential to give the best possible customer experience for our customers. We measure every interaction with our platform, and the most crucial for us is usage. As we are a customer communication platform, the most important is how often users are logging in, how many video/audio calls they have, and how many messages they're sending.
In other words, we measure what the usage of our USP features is. This gives us a look when customers are healthy and where we need to work to make our customers happy.
Perrill | Director of Brand Strategy
The best user engagement metrics to measure and report on depend on the goal of the website. Generally speaking, conversions and conversion rate are almost always the most important measurement of user engagement. After all, if your users aren’t converting, then does any other form of engagement really matter?
Rather than looking at conversion rate as a holistic number (i.e. your site has X% conversion rate), I prefer to look at it in more well-defined context. For example, what’s the ecommerce conversion rate of sessions that contain a product view? This provides a lot more value because it allows us to consider our product layout strategy.
Users that don’t make it to a product page have no chance to make a purchase, so we shouldn’t consider them during this stage. Once we’ve optimized those product pages for conversion, then we can go back and figure out how to get more of those users to a product. Conversions can come in a variety of forms, and I like to report on them at least weekly.
Bounce rate is another great user engagement metric, but it’s often used incorrectly. As with other engagement metrics, it’s best when you look at it within context rather than as a holistic number. For example, if my website’s bounce rate is 62%, does that really tell me anything? No, I need to get a deeper understanding by looking at bounce rate by channel, by device, by landing page, etc.
Some marketers make the mistake of saying a piece of content with a high bounce rate isn’t a good piece of content. We need to understand the goal of each piece of content along with the user’s intent. A blog post may answer a user’s question successfully and not warrant a visit to another page. Is this failure? Absolutely not. However, it does tell us that we might need to add some new opportunities for conversion (such as a newsletter sign up) or make it more enticing to get to another page. I like to report on bounce rate at least once a month with more frequent looks into specific bounce rates.
Scroll depth is another great way to measure user engagement, particularly if you have long pages with important elements further down the page. We need to know what percentage of people are making it to those important elements. If only 25% of your users make it to the bottom of a page, then we either need to move those important elements up or give users more incentive to keep scrolling.
Scroll depth reporting is especially important after launching a new landing page or a new website, but it’s not necessarily something I would continue to report on every month.
One more great user engagement metric is element clicks. I like to set up event tracking on pretty much every element on the website. If we took the time to design it and put it on the page, we should know if visitors are using it. Of course, this has to be done thoughtfully. We need to have a good plan for setting up all these events to make the reports useful and digestible. Then we’ll be able to tell which buttons are being clicked and which ones aren’t, and this will help us uncover A/B testing opportunities so we can increase conversion rates.
I don’t typically report on element clicks directly to a client because it becomes noise. Instead, I analyze this data on a regular basis and then report on A/B testing recommendations.
BrainSell | Customer Success Manager
Customer Retention - we report on retention and expansion weekly. We want to provide our customers with solutions that help their businesses grow, so expansion is a key indicator to our mutual success!
User Data - Since we are a service provider and software reseller, we don't have direct access to user data, but we are consistently partnering with our partnered software publishers to understand how our customers are using so we can provide them with support with user adoption and getting the best return on their investment.
We also go over these areas in annual account reviews and review areas of growth and progress. Having close relationships with our customers in many different areas of their business, means that we are trusted with coming up with solutions to technology and process challenges that may crop up.
Dryrun | CEO
We track both total number of visits as well as frequency, as a baseline, but are also focused on specific behaviors that we know contribute to success and retention. Cash flow management is a unique challenge for users so the metrics we follow are in constant evolution as we learn more about our customers and the factors that drive success. Our Director of Client Success is on top of this data weekly and it's shared with the team on a regular basis.
Musselwhite Marketing | Co-owner
Clicks to dashboards and reports! We've identified in our 10-year existence as an agency that a leading indicator of client withdrawal and dissatisfaction is when they stop looking at the tools (dashboards, reports, etc...) provided them.
Due to this we've implemented link tracking on the tool assets we provide. If a client doesn't click on these links in a 30-day period we programmed our CRM to kick out a task to the team to make a phone call as we've also learned personal connection is oftentimes the very thing needed to get back on track.
HealthMarkets Insurance Agency | Executive Sales Leader
I believe you have to track your results and your customers in order to maximize all investments in your business. I like to use a CRM system we have called AgentConnect to manage my customers as well as my team. This system lets me know when they are entered as a lead elsewhere meaning they are interested in other products, which gives me the opportunity to reach out to them. From this CRM I am also able to track my team's engagement on their contacts and can track the number of attempts at contacts made on a given day or week.
I also use various funnel building software to generate leads from engagement from social media advertising. I am able to see how many times they visit my page or website, and also am able to reach out to them as an exclusive contact. I am able to follow them with drip campaigns as well if they have engaged on any content prior due to tracking with pixels.
Responding to a potential prospect as close to their moment of engagement as possible is crucial in sales, being able to see that in real time changes the game. Technology today has made it very easy and user-friendly to be able to manage your clients, prospects, and team members than it has ever been before. Not taking advantage of the technology available today is going to make your business obsolete.
AKvertise, Inc. | President
We track click-thru-rate (CTR), reactions, comments, shares, and video view metrics that are associated primarily with video campaigns. Typically, we report on these and other conversion specific metrics to our clients on a weekly and monthly basis so we can effectively track changes and trends throughout the year. For some clients, we also run quarterly comparison reports.
Onfleet | CEO & Co-Founder
Dashboard logins, deliveries completed
Wunderkind Agency | Founder
There are 3 main categories of engagement metrics I track with my clients: new user experience (onboarding), engagement and retention.
With new user experience, the most important reports are onboarding funnels. What I look to see is a good overall conversion from signup -> a-ha moment, and good step-by-step conversion rates. With this data, I will use this to prioritise either new user experience overall as a target area in our growth strategy, or a key point in the NUX if there's a particular bottleneck that needs attention.
When it comes to engagement, I always help my clients create a metric that ties in engagement + retention, and this really becomes their key leading indicator. The different between engagement and retention metrics are that engagement metrics are inputs - they correlate to actions people are taking within your product. Retention metrics are lagging, so they are an indication of what has already happened. Examples for a key leading indicator is for Airbnb's demand side:
“Rebook rate” – % of customers that rebook after the first booking
“Nights booked per user” – # of nights booked per user over time
With retention metrics, I'm mostly looking at cohort retention that becomes better overtime.
Ocasta | Marketing Coordinator
On our platform we look at how many articles and news posts an employee has read. This shows us whether they are engaging with the content that is being sent out. We will look at this weekly. We also look at how many learning playlists are being completed this gives us an indicator of whether internal comms needs to work better to push certain playlists or whether we should expand on playlists if a lot of people are doing them. We look at the amount of achievements that are being handed out as this gives an indication of the culture in a business and how well employees are performing. We would look at those monthly as they are not handed out freely.
MediaSesh | SEO Consultant
One of the most important user engagement metrics we track is visits from organic search. We provide this in our monthly reports, but we view this metric every day in order to spot threats or anomalies. This metric is important because it helps us to see if our SEO efforts are working and where there are areas that need improvement. It also helps to highlight seasonality and search trends.
The Advisor Coach LLC | Founder
The most important metric I track is email opens and I track them every day. Lots of people say that open rates don't matter but they are a great proxy for sales, appointments, etc. because it's impossible for people to do business with you from an email unless they open the email in the first place. Constant split-testing and iterating makes an email marketing machine significantly stronger over time.
The Good | Director of Marketing
The key metrics we focus on are relevant visitors and relevant subscribers. We've found these to be the best leading indicators of high-quality leads. We report on these monthly, and adjust our strategy according to our performance in these areas.
Callbell | CEO
With Callbell being a customer support system for WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, we track how many customer inquiries have been managed via our platform. This is a metric we chose as the volume of inquires managed via our platform allows us to estimate the churn probabilty of every account: often times, our customers start paying for our service as substitute to Facebook Pages Manager and WhatsApp Business, which are free of charge. If the volume they manage via our platform is not high enough, the chances of seeing them churning is then much higher.
SPOTIO | VP, Marketing
We track user adoption in the first 90 days, customer engagement (ongoing), and time to resolution (ongoing).
Bourbon Creative | COO
Since I work mostly on the content marketing site with my clients, I typically focus on metrics that help me understand how each piece of content performed, how users reacted to it and how it contributed to the achievement of business goals. Thus, I typically track:
- Time on page: great quality indicators when it comes to blog articles. Typically, the more time a user spends on an article page, the better the quality and content, and the more interesting the piece has been for the user. I report this metric on a monthly basis, but measure it on a weekly basis.
- Bounce rate: a great indicator for measuring user behavior in regards to your content. The lower the bounce rate, the better your content has fulfilled user expectations when they saw your paid ad, organic search result or similar. I report this metric on a monthly basis, but measure it on a weekly basis.
- Pages per session: this is a great metric for two reasons: first, it helps you to identify how relevant and helpful your content is for the users; second, it helps you understand whether your content is actually driving any additional action. If your users are leaving after reading just one article, you’re either not attracting the right audiences or you need to improve your UX and how you move users to the next touchpoint.
- New Visitors vs Returning Visitors: this is a good KPI when it comes to understanding how your long-term content strategy is performing. A high percentage of returning visitors indicates that you’re consistently delivering high-quality content and are building a strong brand in regards to thought-leadership. In other words, if the majority of your visitors are returning visitors, this means that they come to back your website because they trust you and your opinion on a specific topic.
- Conversion rate: This is probably the most important metric for content marketing since it helps you better understand the actual business impact of your content efforts. A high rate indicates that your content marketing strategy is attracting the right traffic and is actually helping in converting them to users. Having said that, it is important to note that this KPI doesn’t measure the full value of your content strategy (it doesn’t measure brand awareness for instance). I report this metric on a weekly basis.
Rankings.io | Founder & CEO
We provide a PDF deliverable to our clients on a monthly basis. That report includes organic traffic movement, keyword progression, completed tasks, and backlinks acquired. Our reporting also contains other data that can indicate a positive trend in an SEO campaign. This includes metrics like time on site, bounce rate of traffic, number of page views, pages per session, and backlink data. That’s our standard reporting that all clients get. Of course, we also augment our reporting to accommodate client requests for specific metrics, such as form fills from organic search.
Impulse Creative | Growth Marketer
One of the best engagement metrics we measure is first-question conversion on our conversational marketing strategy. We use live chat and chatbots to help users engage with us, asking relevant questions as often as we can.
Asking "How can we help?" is okay, but not very contextual or empathetic. Asking someone on a service page for a specific solution a question about helping with that particular problem shows greater context and empathy.
We report on this through our tools HubSpot and Drift along with Google Analytics and a dashboard at Databox. If we have users engaging with our conversational tools, which we track, they're not dismissing the first chat. They're clicking, therefore you know they're engaging.
If you know that the majority of people on a particular bot are dismissing it and not clicking in, it's probably not resonating. You can make adjustments accordingly.
Jumpstart Go | CEO
For our Facebook Group, we look at comments/reactions/posts for user engagement and view them daily and in weekly reports. For our website, we look at the number of pages per session, average session duration, and their activity for engagement and view it weekly. We of course track downloads of lead magnets and purchases of tripwires or products as well the ultimate engagement by users and view those daily/weekly.
Illuminous Marketing Inc. | CEO
User engagement metrics that we track vary depending on the goal of the campaign we’re running. For instance, a brand awareness campaign might track the number of user posts that contain our campaign hashtag and new followers on social channels. A campaign aimed at event registrations might Measure email list growth and number of registrants. For local businesses or e-commerce sites, they might measure number of new reviews coupon codes redeemed.The most important thing is to define some goals and measurable targets before initiating a campaign so everyone is on the same page. Reports are available to our clients at all time within Google Analytics, but we also provide campaign reporting at the end of the campaign or on a monthly basis.
YourParkingSpace | Head of Digital Marketing
We like to A/B test our email marketing campaigns. Once a week, we report on our email marketing open rates and click through rates and compare the results by analyzing which subject lines and email copy sent the most visitors to our website. We then check how many of these visitors registered on our platform.
Kenzi Writes | Writer
Whether it's on a blog or a social posts, the best metrics are real comments. This is the pinnacle of engagement because people are paying attention to what you're saying. I report on comments once a month with all of my other engagement stats.
Orbit Media Studios | Co-founder / CMO
I pay lots of attention to time on page. I pay virtually no attention to bounce rate. I'll explain.
As a content marketer, I want insights into which of my content is engaging for my audience. I write search optimized articles that answer tricky marketing questions. People find them, read them and generally move on with their day. So the bounce rates of my posts are often very high (often 80% or higher). And it doesn't bother me a bit.
But if the time on page is low, I know that the content isn't connecting. Something must be missing from the piece. I might need to improve it by adding more answers, more examples, more statistics, more contributor quotes ...or maybe a video.
As an SEO and content marketing, time on page is everything to me and I check in for each article in the few weeks right after it goes live. But bounce rate? Not so much. I don't really pay any attention to it.
Search Facts | Owner
I track users in Google Analytics as my key performance indicator. It measures how many individual people visit my site in a given time period. If I am actively working on a project, then I will measure it daily and write the number down in a spreadsheet (along with a few others). If I am not actively working on a project then I track it less often, for example monthly.
9Sail | Lead Digital Strategist
The user engagement metrics that we track are unique visitors, conversions, bounce rate, and top exit pages. We work with service-based industries so we are always looking to drive up the number of unique visitors to the site because each visitor has the potential to complete an action that we set up for the client, which is usually filling out a contact form or calling the company for a quote.
We focus on bounce rate and top exit pages to see why certain pages do not retain users and we figure out the best way to improve those pages to keep users on the site longer and funnel them to a contact page through calls to action. We have monthly reporting calls with our clients to go through these numbers, but internally we are checking these at least weekly to make sure there are no major dips or spikes that we need to dig into.
Influ2 | Marketing Manager
Influ2 allows you to show ads to specific people and analyze your ad impact on each targeted person. To do so, we track all engagement signals that might occur and convert them into a target score, so we can easily identify qualified leads with the highest priority. Therefore, the most important engagement metrics for me are CTR, VTR, session duration and MQLs derived from behavioral scoring, which I report for each ad campaign every two weeks.
Inbound Marketing Agency | Founder
The uncommon but important user engagement metrics we track are:
- Pogostick rate: the amount of users that go back to search results page after clicking listing in organic results, which indicates the page did not satisfy the users search.
- Bounce rate: the percentage of users that navigate away from your website without viewing additional pages.
- Deeper click rate: the click through rate only including users who viewed more than 1 page
- Time on site avg.: how long a user spends on your website
We report these metrics on a monthly basis, but will measure on a weekly basis.
Wolfgang Digital | Head of SEO
Average Sessions per User
In the 2020 edition of our annual eCommerce KPI report, having analysed over a third of a billion euro worth of eCommerce conversion data, we uncovered trend data that shows that the average online purchaser requires approximately 2.5x as many clicks as the average visitor before making a purchase.
It’s clear there is more value in creating extra visits from existing users than a first click with a new user. The best performing websites in our study are the ones that can attract that user back again and again, increasing their Average Sessions per User.
Insights around your customer’s path to purchase are the most important insights you can uncover. Our correlation analysis validates this with higher Average Sessions per User a key differentiator of the high-performance websites.
This, to us, makes making Avg. Users per Session one of the most important, lesser-known KPIs worth monitoring and reporting on at least on a monthly basis to give your business the edge when it comes to mining and interpreting data that'll impact your business' bottom line.
Challenger School | Digital Marketing Manager
Weekly, we hold a marketing coordination meeting where we review ad campaigns, organic, paid, and referral traffic. Our main KPI is users scheduling a tour. When considering site engagement we typically review; average session duration, average pages per visit, and goal conversion rate. Each traffic source has their own unique challenges and in turn, their own performances metrics.
Users that come in from a referral source convert at a much higher rate, because they already have exposure to our brand. Our goal is to drive more users from a 3rd party profile to our website. Organic sees a mixture of organic traffic and traffic from Google My Business. For organic users we are focused on increasing average pages per session, because they can typically convert on the first visit if they visit more than four pages.
Paid traffic is a more of a branding play, so we focus on sheer traffic and less on engagement, but rather page load times to improve the experience and the likelihood of the user to return.
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Mavens & Moguls | Founder & CEO
I track repeat customers and referrals quarterly which are key to my business and the most cost efficient way to scale the brand.
ESL Authority | Founder
We're most concerned with jobs viewed, jobs applied for, and pages per session - the last one is important because our main marketin channel is organic and we want to funnel people to related jobs which might take a few clicks. We track all of this via Data Studio Dashboards that I review monthly.
Pocket Insights | Founder
I love reporting on whether users are returning and how much time is between sessions - This is a great indication of how engaged your users really are. I typically report on this monthly. Then beyond that I want to know how users are experiencing the site across devices, so I dig deep into landing pages, exit pages and pages per session. These metrics too are included in my monthly reporting.
Then what sort of marketer would you be if you didn't closely monitor conversion rates across devices, locations, and traffic sources. We all want our websites to convert and understanding how your conversion rate is influenced is critical, which is good reason to report on it on a weekly basis.
Colour Rich | UX Designer
Before anything else, we will look at page views on a weekly basis. We want to see a steady increase in the number of people coming to a client's site to ensure our optimisation strategy is working as expected. We will then usually look the individual pages views, as this is a really useful gauge of a site's usability and content quality.
Anvil Media | President
Website engagement metrics should be tracked and monitored weekly, but no less than monthly, and include:
- Time on Site: provides insights into the relative stickiness of the site, but may be misleading unless it's cross-referenced with conversion data, otherwise, users could simply be lost.
- Average page-views-per-user: provides insights into stickiness as well, but also insights into the customer journey; it should be analyzed with conversions for context.
- Bounce rate: site-wide, home page and key product or service page bounce rates should all be monitored and regularly optimized to reduce bounce rates.
For social media, engagement metrics include likes, shares and comments and should be reviewed weekly ideally, monthly at a minimum.
Max Effect Marketing | Digital Marketing Manager
Considering the rising low-attention span of users online, we track organic traffic, bounce rate, new visitors, page views as these make the most sense to our business and for our clients. We track them once in a month to gather enough data for deriving insights as to what needs to be done next and what areas need improvement.
Wirepas | Head of Marketing and Communications
Mainly we track webleads. We want to see what kind of social media, advertising, event or email activities customers and potential customers respond to. We want to follow them to have leads for sales but also to develop our own marketing.
Hook Agency | Owner, Lead Strategist
One of the most important metrics we track is 'time on site' – for us, this metric is invaluable for determining what our best content is. Recently I trimmed 100 pieces of content on our site that had poor metrics, either combining them with others or dropping altogether. This kind of pruning makes a ton of sense on a site that's been around a long time and has 1k+ pieces of content.
UNINCORPORATED | Founder & CEO
I feel like I could write an entire graduate dissertation on this topic if I went into detail for all the metrics we track for ourselves and our clients, so I'll focus on a few key ones that we track for UNINCORPORATED.
Metrics should always relate back to business goals and KPIs. For us, our KPIs are new leads, exploratory calls, and proposals. To drive toward these conversions, we focus on two main channels: our website and LinkedIn.
On our website, we track organic impressions, clicks, and CTR using Google Search Console. We use SEMRush to track specific keywords in our niche for visibility, estimated traffic, and average position. At a high level, these metrics let us know how well our content is doing from an optimization and audience relevancy point-of-view. Drilling down further, we track CTA impressions, clicks, and submission rates to see how well our content offers convert website visitors into leads.
Once a lead is in our system we start tracking email open rates, CTR, and conversion rates to measure the success of email nurtures and sales sequences.
Other website metrics we keep an eye on for trend identification, but not necessarily as indications of success or failure, include dwell time, bounce rate, and exit rate.
For LinkedIn, our main metrics are profile views, organic post views, post engagement, connection requests, new contacts, and new connection conversion rate. We use a combination tools which give us high-level visibility into these metrics. The primary CTA we're driving toward are meetings with prospective collaborators and clients.
We report on the aforementioned metrics every Friday during a standing team meeting. This gives us an opportunity to celebrate wins as a team, identify places in our strategy where we need to pivot, and brainstorm process improvements.
Other channels like social media, marketing bots, and pop-up forms we report on much less frequently. These are part of the mix, but not our key drivers. Ideally, we report on these channels once a quarter.
inSided | Marketing Manager
Questions to Support, NPS scores, Engagement in our User Community - activity levels in the community, community sentiment, feature requests/ideas etc, Interactions with CSM. The CSM team tracks these monthly Happy to go into more detail if you need more context
Return On Now | President
We could test many different metrics, but the following are what we monitor on our own domain to ensure the content is resonating with our target audiences:
1. Bounce rates - Bounce rate is a great indicator of how well your content engages visitors upon entry to the website. If the bounce rate increases, your page is not doing a great job of ushering the along to other relevant content.
2. Time on page - This one goes hand-in-hand with bounce rates, since bounces count as a zero time on page. Fix one, and you often see the other improve. Regardless, if people are spending upward of 1-2 minutes on any page, it's doing something well and keeping them on the website.
3. Pages per session - True engagement goes beyond the entry page, obviously. If you can get visitors to stick around for 3+ pages per session on average, your site is doing well.
4. Page/scroll depth - Do visitors to a page review what is "above the fold" only, or are they consuming more content and scrolling down? Depending on the goal of the individual pages, this can tell you a lot about how engaging your copy is.
5. Top exit pages - If you see a handful of pages showing up as the top exit page on your domain consistently, check to see if you can do anything to reduce those exit rates. Don't overthink it on landing pages, however, since they may only have visited for the offer and don't want to spend time meandering around the website until after you contact them again.
6. Abandonment rate - If you run an ecommerce website, you absolutely need to know how many people put items in their cart and then abandon the purchase before paying. This is the most important metric after conversion rate and revenue collected for these businesses.
Intuitive Digital | Sr. Account and Brand Manager
Typically we provide monthly or quarterly reports to our partners (depending on which services they're on, and the size of their engagement). We determine which user engagement metrics to track based on the partners goals. Are they trying to increase awareness? Then we're looking at impression growth and an increase in click through rate. If they're trying to convert new customers we're tracking website conversions, which may be form submissions, email sign ups, or e commerce purchases etc. Are we assessing user quality? Then we're tracking bounce rate, number of pages viewed and time on page, in addition to conversions.
UClimb | Founder
2+ Page Visits: This metric is the positive opposite of bounce rate, and indicates that a website visitor has found enough of interest to encourage them to click further. If clients are interested in this level of detail, I report on this monthly.
Session Length: The metric indicates how 'sticky' your content is, whether the content writing or videos are gripping enough to keep visitors on the website for longer. Again, if clients are interested in this level of detail, I report on this monthly.
Horseshoe + co. | Founder
We track returning users each week. It indicates how much of our traffic is qualified, and how ready they are to convert.
