Besides traffic, what are the most important website engagement metrics every marketing team should track? We asked 60 marketers to share their thoughts.
Kiera Abbamonteon August 14, 2019 (last modified on July 30, 2021) • 14 minute read
When we dug into which of those engagement metrics they found to be most important, the usual suspects—average time on page, bounce rate, and average session duration—led the pack.
But we also heard about other engagement metrics that aren’t usually talked about as much.
Our research also found that a majority of the marketers we spoke with use Google Search Console to do all of this measurement and tracking.
每个营销人员都需要跟踪的14个网站参与度指标
PRO TIP: How to track these 10 popular Google Analytics metrics
跳出率: Do visitors leave shortly after landing on your website? Or do they stick around?
平均会话持续时间: How much time are people spending on your website? Users with a high average session duration are most likely relevant to your company.
Goal completions: How many users responded to your call to action?
If you want to track these in Google Analytics, you might find the visualizations limiting. It’s also a bit time-consuming to combine all the metrics you need in one view.
To better understand how your website performs in terms of traffic growth and conversions, we’ve made thisplug-and-play dashboardthat contains all the essential metrics for understanding how successful you are at optimizing different aspects of your website.
“跳出率告诉您有多少网站访问者打开您的页面，然后直接回到Google。它可以很好地表明您的内容回答他们的问题及其可读性。” Alice Stevens解释说最好的公司。
“跳出率is crucial in determining whether something is wrong with your website and, therefore, why visitors aren’t exploring your site further,” added Fiona Kay ofNigel Wright团体。
“就像在现实世界中,第一印象ke a big difference on the web,”枫树层面’ Nate Masterson told us. “You can expect to see a high bounce rate if your visitors feel spammed by too many calls-to-action or feel bored by lack of quality design.”
“It’s all well and good having high traffic to your site, but if the bounce rate is also high, your content isn’t engaging people enough to stick around,” Katherine Rowland ofYourParkingSpace添加。“Ultimately you want your content to entice people into taking action, and if they aren’t then really what is the point.”
As far as analyzing bounce rate data, Dan Rawley ofTwinkl建议寻找最高跳出率的页面首先解决的页面，“通过最高的跳出率的人过滤页面使您可以轻松地发现人们不按预期与该网站互动并采取行动。”
魏德特小组的凯利Wilhelme告诉我们它是最有用的at bounce rate over time to find anomalies and changes, saying, “It’s important to look at the bounce rate for your site over time to make sure it’s not increasing. This could indicate something is broken and have a negative impact on your SEO and organic traffic rank. The last thing you want is for Google to stop sending you traffic because users are not finding what they need.”
And Kris Gunnars of搜索事实shared this pro tip: “I like to change the bounce rate calculation in Google Analytics to an ‘adjusted’ bounce rate. By changing the Google Analytics snippet and adding a ‘setTimeout’ command, you can tell Google to count a visitor as not having bounced if they’re still on your site after 15 seconds.”
The pages per session metric is, in effect, what comes right after bounce rate. So the visitor didn’t bounce off the first page, what did they do next? How many more pages did they visit and engage with?
Dallin Hatch ofwomplyadded, “It’s one of the best proxies to gauge both the value of your content to visitors and the optimization of your site layout.”
Sloan explained that “average session duration is great to understand what sources are resonating with your target market. For example, you can see if a recent Facebook campaign is attracting the right customers after just a few days, rather than waiting a few weeks to review the conversions. ”
Antonella WeidmanWebTektold us that website engagement also comes down to click-through rate on your search results. “If your website is getting a lot of impressions in search but has a low click-through-rate, this is a sign that the title tag and meta description may need to be refined to entice more users to click.”
5. Exit Rate and Top Exit Pages
“If you could figure out the reasons people exit your website from a particular page, you could fix it to keep people on your website for longer. Longer stays not only win you SEO benefits but help you build relationships, too,” mused Zarar Ameen ofCanz营销。
“This is vitally important to your business because it helps you understand what your customers are thinking and how they respond to your website in general,” Colin Mosier ofJSL营销和网页设计添加。“一旦找到客户最多离开网站的地方，就可以优化此区域并改善客户的获取。”
“More returning visitors means a bigger group of engaged people to build a relationship with,” noted Laetitia Caron ofMedicalSearch。
“You have many ways to attract visitors to your website, but what really counts is the amount of (qualitative) visitors returning to your website,” Caron added. “Returning visitors mean your touchpoints are working, that people are satisfied after their first website visit.”
“页面上的平均时间是国王，”大声的数字说。“Combined with the Comparison data view, you can quickly see which pages let your website down or put users off.”
Doug Stewart ofAppleton Creativeadded, “By looking at the average time spent on-page, you can help to determine the quality of your website traffic. For example, if you’re getting a significant amount of website visitors, but users are spending only seconds on a page, this could be a key indicator that your targeting strategies are off and need to be adjusted.”
“We like measuring this metric in conjunction with tools like HotJar to allow us to clearly visualize a customer’s on-page journey,” added Lewis Kemp of灯泡媒体。
When it comes to improving average time on page, Johnny Santiago ofberifyshared this advice, “To improve your website’s average time on page, you could try making your content more engaging by adding visuals such as images, gifs, or maybe even try embedding videos. Also, try enhancing the readability of your content by breaking up long paragraphs into smaller chunks and by adding bullet points.”
埃文·伊丽莎白·哈德您好营销机构agreed. “I often see folks using gross traffic numbers to justify keyword value and content decisions. You’re better off setting up event tracking to understand what key phrases actually drive ROI. Then you can make smarter content decisions that drive real value.”
克里斯蒂娜·布罗德兹基（Christina Brodzky）MediaSeshpointed out that events can include micro-conversions like email newsletter signups, new blog comments, etc. and macro conversions like product purchases and revenue.
“B2B marketers should track how many times people clicked on that .pdf download button,” Kožuljević added. “Ecommerce owners can optimize their cart-to-purchase sequence by using events on specific interactions.”
“Sometimes, it’s easy to get infatuated with total visits,” observed Antonella Pisani of事实商品, “but it’s fairly easy to buy traffic.” Instead, Pisani recommends measuring more conversion-oriented metrics like dollars per visitor.
乔纳森·奥弗雷（Jonathan Aufray）说：“最重要的网站参与度指标是访问者数量产生的线索的百分比。”Growth Hackers。“The goal is to keep improving the conversion rate by changing the copy, using power words to entice people to contact us or give us their email address, etc. If this week, you have a conversion rate of 10%, let’s try to do 11% next week, 12% the following week, and on.”
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