User Engagement: What It Is & 6 Tips to Increase It

Knowing how your online presence affects your business is crucial if you want to market and grow effectively. Your online presence largely depends on factors such as your online reputation and user engagement. 

User engagement comprises a wide variety of metrics that measure shares, clicks, downloads, and comments your content is receiving. Generally, the more engagement a company sees from its target market, the more chances it gets to convert leads into paying customers. In turn, growth becomes more achievable. 

If you want more traffic and, therefore, more conversions, you need to pay attention to your user engagement and the metrics tied to it. In this article, you will get a complete guide to improving user engagement for your company, attracting more traffic that you can turn into customers, and boosting revenue. 

What Is User Engagement?

User engagement measures how much your audience interacts with your website and social media profiles. It provides key insights into just how valuable your product, service, or content is to users. When an audience finds a website or resource useful or helpful, they spend time sharing that content, liking posts, and leaving comments. They’re also more likely to sign up for offers and purchase services or products. 

Understanding the metrics that go into measuring user engagement is important. By becoming more familiar with these metrics, you can adjust your customer engagement strategies and optimize them for success.  

Why Is User Engagement Important?

Measuring user engagement is important because it gives you a chance to view how your customers see your business. When you want a more objective view of your company, you need to see it from the user’s experience. Measuring engagement gives you critical feedback on what your customer’s like about your content. 

Improving user engagement can help your company reach more potential customers and bring an increase in revenue. Some ways managing your user engagement will help your business include the following: 

1. Improves Referrals

An increase in user engagement can result in more leads and referrals for your company. The more engagement you have, the more visible your business becomes online. This visibility will go a long way in increasing lead-generating capabilities and can even potentially boost conversion. 

When you maintain positive user engagement for your business, you benefit from an improved image among customers. Trust is built and more people refer your business to others. This will translate to an increase in revenue.

2. Improves Brand Recognition

When you improve user engagement for your business, you will see an improvement in brand recognition as well. This is because engaging users means getting more shares, likes, comments, and generally more people speaking about your business. 

Getting the word out about your company helps improve brand recognition. Additionally, when your brand is associated with positive interactions, new customers will be more inclined to try your products or services. Studies have shown that customers read reviews when they shop online and often trust recommendations from loved ones.

3. Improves Sales and Conversions

Essentially, customers recommend your business when they share your content. Potential customers will see how helpful your content is and how your company interacts with clients and this will speak for itself.

When you keep customers engaged by providing high-quality content and reliable customer service, you are likely to see a higher number of conversions and therefore increased sales. This can go a long way in boosting your business’s growth.

User Engagement Metrics and Calculation

There are several metrics used to measure user engagement. When you follow and track these metrics, you can easily identify areas where you excel and weak spots where you struggle.

These metrics also offer crucial insights into a webpage’s UX design and your content. When used correctly, the data can give you accurate insights into growing your user engagement and, therefore, your business.

Some metrics used in measuring user engagement include but aren’t limited to the following:

1. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate takes into consideration the time site visitors spend on a page. It measures how quickly a site visitor browses away from your website or if they leave without clicking anything. The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of one-page visits by the number of total website visits.

If your website currently has a bounce rate of over 55%, you need to make some improvements to your site quickly. A respectable bounce rate is lower than 40%.

2. Time on page

One way to measure user engagement is through the amount of time site visitors spend on a webpage. After the initial discovery process, you want to see how long a lead or customer browses a particular page. If you catch a visitor’s attention, they will linger over your content longer.

The average time on page is an excellent measure of user engagement. For instance, a piece of content 500 words long takes about 2 minutes to read. If you have users staying on a 1000-page for longer than about 3 minutes, you have good engagement and you can safely assume they are reading the content. Try to make more of the type of content that keeps potential customers on your website.

3. Clickthrough Rate

The clickthrough rate is the percentage of site visitors clicking on a specific link or ad compared to total page visits. AdWords has an average clickthrough rate of 2%, so if yours is above that, it is considered good.

The benchmark changes depending on the platform you are working with. For Google, in 2020, it averaged 1.55%. Currently, the highest CTR is for dining ads on Google at 11.7%, while the rate is at 6.93% on Bing. These numbers will give you an idea of what to expect from yours.

4. Returning Visitor Rate

A returning visitor is defined as someone who has visited your site before and returns within a short time period. This rate also measures how often a visitor returns to your site. Active users will spend more time on your social media accounts, which leads to an increase in customer engagement.

This metric can also give you some insight into how your content is received. Again, you want to repeat what is working well and minimize the type of content your visitors don’t engage with.

How to Increase User Engagement: 6 Tips

There are many things you can do to increase the number of website visitors you get and therefore improve user engagement. Between creating marketing campaigns that bring in new customers to designing a plan for improved customer retention, you need to have good engagement to run a successful business.

Some tips for increasing user engagement include the following:

1. Understand Users’ Context

Knowing your user’s context means knowing their background and unique problems. You can do some market research by studying the demographics of the people who visit your website. Some analytics and SEO platforms also provide insights into the search queries visitors use to get to your website.

Understanding your audience can improve your ability to appeal to their desires and catch their attention. You can create content that solves their problems and therefore improve user engagement.

2. Focus on the Content Users Love

Make sure you publish high-value content that your users can use and that they love. Engage your users by sharing content that gives valuable answers to popular search questions. This will not only improve your SEO efforts, but visitors will also stay on your page to get the answer they need.

For instance, if your customers are pet owners, you can create how-to videos about grooming cats or dogs at home. If your business offers cleaning services, you can post tips for caring for a pool. Your target market will likely be searching for answers to their problems and they may land on your page as they’re looking for help online. Provide the help they need and they will turn into paying customers.

3. Improve UX and UI Design

You need to make sure your website provides a smooth, intuitive user experience to improve user engagement. Your website should feel easy and natural to navigate while leading the visitor to interesting content on your site.

Like in boosting app user engagement, an effective website design plays an important role in achieving good user engagement. Keep webpages uncomplicated and direct, and make sure they feature all the information site visitors need. Keeping webpage design simple also results in faster loading times, which can reduce the bounce rate.

4. Solve Technical Issues

A buggy website won’t have people stick around for long. It can be frustrating to wait for images to load or deal with other technical issues. Landing on a slow or unresponsive webpage will not only frustrate potential clients, but it can also get you negative reviews.

Visitors won’t work through technical issues to find value in your site. The harder you work to eliminate technical problems within your site, the better your site traffic and page views will be.

5. Test Your Content

When you start creating content and publishing it, you need to consider feedback and use it when developing your new content. You have analytics tools that help you see which content is well-received and which content just doesn’t click with your audience.

Keeping track of the content new customers gravitate toward and the content monthly active users share can help you refine your content creation and marketing strategies. Use the information to create future content tailored toward different segments of your audience and watch your user engagement improve.

6. Add Internal Links

Adding internal links throughout your content can help with customer retention. When website visitors bounce between pages on your site, the time visitors spend on your site will increase. It doesn’t matter if it is on the same page, as long as it is on your website. This will improve your SEO and user engagement efforts, so it is a win-win situation.

Getting Traffic to Engage Users

Before you can measure user engagement and factors like average engagement time, you need to have a good number of monthly active users visiting your website. Your customer base starts with the traffic coming to your site, as does your engagement, so make sure you are getting enough traffic and placing high enough on SERPs.

Luckily, there are sites and tools that can help you with increasing your traffic. Podium offers solutions for companies looking to increase their reviews, engagement, and online presence in general. Reviews are critical to improving engagement and online presence because users get a better idea of what your company does.

More reviews means more business for you, so remember to make your website a conversation starter by including quality graphics, useful pop-up buttons, and content that solves problems.

Podium is here to help you with each step of the process and improve your customer engagement and overall online presence.