How To Increase User Engagement – At a brick-and-mortar store, you will know a business is doing well if there are a lot of people going to and buying from that store. For a website, one of the most important ways to measure its performance is user engagement. Of course, the more interactions a website has the more sales it will have.
A lot of business owners struggle with their websites reaching a point where it’s not getting a lot of engagements. It’s getting higher bounce rates than revenues. And it’s not meeting their goals. So, the next sensible thing to do is to revamp your website.
Right?
Well, yes. And no.
Yes, low engagement on your site can mean you need to make a few changes. However, if you do an overhaul without digging deep as to what could have caused it to not work the way it’s supposed to, it would just be shooting in the dark. You’re pointing at nowhere and so, you’re going nowhere.
In the end, you’ll only be wasting a lot of money.
Measuring Website Engagement
In order to make your website perform optimally for you, first, you need to measure user engagement. From there, you’ll have enough data to help you make the necessary adjustments on your site.
Most websites would consider the shifts in their bounce rate to tell whether they are getting enough engagement or not. The truth is, there is more to it than the up and down cycle of your site’s bounce rate. There are several factors that could affect bounce rate and user engagement.
To measure user engagement on your site, you need to check several crucial metrics.
1. Engaged Time
To determine whether your content is effective in inviting users to engage with your site, it’s important to measure the engaged time, also known as attention minutes. This is similar to session duration, but only counts the time a user is active on one of your pages. The user should be doing something on the page within a certain interval. The time they spent there is recorded as attention minutes. This includes clicking, scrolling, watching a video, or listening to audio.
While not all analytics applications can accurately measure engaged time, it is worth installing one if you want to track user engagement.
2. Interactions
This is the next best option if you can’t track engaged time.
A user can be interacting with your website through comments, downloads, shares, clicks, or other actions that you consider important enough to record. Some actions may be more important than others though. It would best to provide a numerical weighing to certain actions to be able to track them.
Once you have the numerical scores, divide them by the number of unique visits. That way you’ll be able to determine whether your content is engaging enough. For example, you can tell there is engagement by the number of articles a user has clicked or checked in one single session. Oftentimes, when a user goes from one post to the next, it could be a sign that you have content that’s interesting enough for a user to engage with your site.
3. Frequency Of Visits
How frequently users visit your site is one of the biggest indicators of user engagement. Initially, you will check how many times a certain user checks out your site. Then, you will also look at the average number of days between visits.
For example, if you’re updating the site daily but users only return after a month, then there may be something wrong with your site. But if your site gets updated monthly and users return once a month, then it makes perfect sense. Measuring the frequency of visits per user can be quite tricky from which to gain real insights. However, you should also consider the type of website you have since it will heavily impact the data.
4. Scroll Depth
The deeper a user scrolls down a page the better. If a user scrolls far down a page, it’s an indicator that they find it useful and relevant to them. This can help you optimize your site’s design as it can provide you with the necessary insight on the best positions for your calls to action.
One of the advantages of tracking scroll depth is that there are lots of applications that will let you track it. However, keep in mind that it can’t be used in isolation since some users may just be scrolling through a page because they can’t find what they’re looking for right away.
One of the most sure-fire ways to measure engagement is through comments and shares on social media. Users are most likely to comment, like, or share content that they think offers valuable information. However, since negative comments and dislikes can be tracked, too, you should consider tracking the sentiment of a mention or comment instead.
How To Increase User Engagement On Your Website
No metric is the perfect tool for measuring engagement. You need all of the metrics mentioned above to work together in terms of conversion, usability, and engagement to get a bigger, clearer picture of your site’s performance.
1. Use Live Chat To Assist Site Visitors In Realtime
One of the things that visitors find frustrating is the long wait time to get answers. A study revealed that 59% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand when their queries are answered in less than a minute.
To reduce visitors’ wait time, implement live chat into your site. A chatbot can help your website engage with visitors in real-time, especially when it comes to offering assistance. Companies that use live chat say that they experienced a 34% increase in customer satisfaction rates.
Set up automated and customized welcome messages that greet customers whenever they open your site. This guides visitors in the direction that you want to lead them to. A chatbot can provide you with valuable insight into visitors’ behavior and touchpoints. This enables you to provide better services that will foster trust and loyalty. In the end, this strategy will boost your sales conversion rate.
2. Use Messaging That’s Clear And Concise
Whatever the purpose of your site is, be it for products, services, or a blog page, you have to make sure that every page makes the core messaging crystal clear to your visitors. When a user comes to your product page, make sure you position your core products in such a way that they convey your intended message. This will help you engage visitors the right way.
Here are a few tips you can use:
- Make your messaging more appealing to your audience.
- Focus on the user’s needs when communicating your brand’s purpose and value.
- It should be clear to your audience that what you do or what you sell adds a positive impact on their lives.
- Clearly state what your brand does to avoid confusion.
3. Highlight Social Proof On Your Website
A survey shows that 70% of consumers say they are more likely to trust a brand based on others’ opinions of them. A lot of e-commerce sites use social proof to increase buyer confidence and improve user engagement. This can be in form of reviews, real-time statistics, star ratings, and testimonials that are posted on websites. This is because reviews and ratings can validate a buyer’s decision, which is why you should seriously consider incorporating them into your digital marketing strategy. In the end, it can build your brand’s credibility, which can, in turn, increase your customer base and sales.
4. Make CTAs More Enticing
Calls to action or CTAs act as prompts for users to take your desired action. These include phrases or buttons, like “Join Now”, “Buy Now”, “Add to Cart”, and the like. Phrases that prod people into taking a desirable action should be prudently used across your site to boost user engagement.
There are so many things you can do to encourage users to click on your CTAs. These include asking followers to comment on your social media posts or blogs, subscribe to your email list, and connect with you via social media. You need to use the right language if you want your CTAs to stand out.
To effectively use calls to action to boost user engagement, you should follow these suggestions.
- Use contrasting colors to make CTA buttons more noticeable.
- The size and shape of the buttons should effectively draw people’s attention instantly.
- Use unique words that grab people’s attention to your CTAs.
- Incorporate the element of value proposition in the CTA buttons (e.g., “Free Guide”, “Save up to 10%”, etc.)
5. Personalize Your Messaging
Businesses are expected to understand different consumer needs and preferences and provide relevant information, products, services, and solutions. Today’s consumers expect businesses to go the extra mile to communicate with them in a meaningful and personalized way. This means that the more customized your messaging is, the more likely the customers will respond to it. To create a detailed plan on making marketing messages more customer-focused, you must base your strategy on data analytics.
- Automate marketing to ensure that visitors immediately see the content at the right time.
- Listen to your audience to help you optimize your messages in a way that resonates with them.
- Use interactive tools to gather customer data and insight into what your target market is most interested in.
6. Optimize Your Website
Make your website mobile responsive. This is because 56% of website traffic is from mobile users. This emphasizes the need to make all websites more responsive to keep up with the shift in how consumers interact with the web nowadays. In other words, you want to make sure that your mobile visitors will have a good experience on your site to avoid driving them away.
Take a look at how to make your website appease mobile and desktop users.
- Both mobile and desktop users should be able to access the same content no matter the device they are using.
- Buttons should be designed to work just fine when using mobile devices.
- Allow an easy way to allow users to switch from mobile to desktop and vice versa.
- Use larger font sizes to ensure users can easily read content on your site even on a smaller screen.
7. Increase Your Site’s Load Time
Websites with too much going on on every page tend to load slower, which can make users frustrated, lowering the sites’ use engagement. To make users want to stay longer on your site, optimize the load time. Use tools, like GTMetrix, to find out what you need to do to speed up load time.
Conclusion
Ensuring that your website has great user engagement means you have optimized it with the end-user in mind. You are focusing your efforts on ensuring that your site visitors will enjoy their time on your site enough for them to come back for more.
All in all, good user engagement can help increase your sales. Moreover, it can foster loyalty in your customers, which in turn increase user engagement on your website.
