Did you ever look at analytics dashboard and still feel that something is missing?
The traffic numbers, its source, landing pages, session, duration, etc should be reported. However, there are some things that Google Analytics do not report, i.e. reader engagement and loyalty.
The sad part is that Google Analytics does not come with any initiative, loyalty track and out of box engagement. You need to work very hard to find all the indicators that show their values.
Local SEO Company Melbourne suggests that the metrics like bounce rate, duration of session, rate or return visitors aid do not reveal full picture.
There is a specific reason for not including definitive engagement metric in your dashboard. People wonder why concept like engagement cannot be hard coded.
The real engagement does not catch like a wild fire except in the white paper, analyst reports and pundit reports. You should try to measure the heart metric and try to measure with head data and make unique feeling engagement for each site. It will always have unique definition for each and every site.
The engagement metric of site is too unique and it should be applied as a standard across the sites. After all, the publisher’s site from an ecommerce and aggregator site is varies from the review portal.
Due to different nature of the site, lots of engagement and loyalty evaluation is left for analyst to interpret based on underlying site type and all its objectives.
Google analytics may miss the big picture, but it does not give stats for indicating how loyal or engaged the readership really is. Different engagement and loyalty metrics in the Google Analytics should know how to interpret it. A lot of user engagement is left for interpretation of analyst and it is subjective to the site under consideration. To measure engagement of site, it can help you to understand the metrics.
It is important to understand things like:
- The bounce rate
- The bounce rate reveals the number of people who leave the site from the same page in which they landed.
- A high rate of bounce on a blog means that the readers did not like what they read.
- Same bounce rate in an online store may not be bad as it means that the visitors land on an item that they intend to buy and click through for checking out. It can also mean that the visitor comes to look for some information, found it and then left from the page.
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Here is how an average bounce rate for different types of industries looks like:
If you find that your site has a reasonable low rate of bounce for its type, just fix it.
- Demystify the duration of Session
Local SEO Company Melbourne understands that duration of the session is the length of the session in seconds. Therefore, you need to go to the audience then behavior and engagement to find the metric duration session.
The more your readers stay on the site, the happier they are with the content of your site. It means the longer the session, and the higher would be the engagement. Blogs that publish long posts should ideally see long sessions. Most sessions are about 60 sec sessions, and it means that the readers are not interested in reading what is offered. It may not be possible to read about 2000 words in about 60 seconds.
However, the same theory would not stand true for sub-domain on a site that is fully dedicated to the FAQs. A low session length means something good, and it is because the readers may come looking for some instructions for help. They may find them, debug their issues and leave quickly. In most of the cases, the longer session would translate to a more number of views ideally. Determine what session duration really means for your site and estimate the level based on your reader’s engagement.
- Identify issues of site with page depth
Page depth means the count of pages that a visitor visits your site from their landing page. It is the page view/session. A high page depth figure seems to be an indicator of content, and it engages readers and motivates them to explore the site further. However, if you see that the most visitors visit about 1- 2 pages on your site, you may find the reason behind this behavior. You may start by reviewing the design and navigation of site due to poor navigation experience that could mean low value of page depth.
Another thing that a Local SEO Company advises you to consider is internal links. Low page depth may be the result of the poor internal link. Check if adding internal links improves page depth metric. You may use this data for finding the most visited pages on your site and optimize it for higher conversion as per the site’s site. The e-commerce site has a number of visits, and it has more than 20-page depth.
You may use new vs. returning metric for analyzing the user interactions. This metric allows you to understand the way your new and returning visitors interact with your site. The experts reveal the difference between new and returning visitors who are engaged in your site. There are many ways of using the engagement metric. Let’s take an example now.
If you show ads for earning revenue, after seeing how your readers engage with the site, you may draw new traffic to get more clicks. In case of an impression based revenue scheme, you may focus on building email list and improve your returning visitor metric
Returning Visitor Rate is the rate of return visitors come to your site. A higher RVR reveals that you are good in bringing the return visitors to your site. To calculate RVR, you need to divide the number of returning visitors to your site by the number of unique visitors for a given period. Suppose, you have 10,000 visitors and 3000 are repeat visitors, and your RVR would turn to be 30 percent. (3000/10000). For this content, the RVR is 40%, and this means that your content is more engaging if your RVR turns out to be 30. It is important to interpret the frequency and Regency i.e. counts of sessions and days since the last session was used.
The frequency metric reveals the number of courses on which users are particularly returning users have higher sequence numbers. The same logic is used, and all the new visitors will be seen in the first session. On the other hand, authority metric shows the number of days between the user sessions.
The frequency metric reveals the number of session on which users particularly returning users have higher session numbers. The same logic is used and all the new visitors will be seen on the first session. On the other hand, regency metric shows number of days between the user sessions.
Compare different seasons and gauge changes in the frequency of visitor. It gives some insight into what seasons your local customers come to the site and when the site performs at acquiring new ones.
Most visitors in their first or second session indicate the session count.
- Measure engagement level with an Average page/time on site metric
An average page or time on site metric gives you a broader idea of audience’s engagement level. It means different things in different context. A high average time on site with a low view of the page will act as a good indicator as it means that people are actually reading and consuming content of your site.
However, the same thing is not relevant to the publisher site, as it needs more page views to make more revenue and aim to have high average time. As an average page per time on site is subjective metrics, you should spend some quality time for analyzing the needs of the visitors.
- Local SEO Company Melbourne gives you tips to improve your session duration in a post
- Use segments for detecting patterns
- All the engagement metrics show data across the traffic. However, for drawing better insight from the basic user engagement metrics, you may use segmentation.
- Segment engagement statistics helps in identifying patterns in the buyers segment. If you apply for page depth engagement, you may find new users to show low page depth value, and this may lead to the discovery of navigation problem of your site.
- Advance content engagement tracking with the event
You may check Justin Cutroni script to measure content engagement. Justin created a script to help to measure content engagement with its scrolling function. The script measures reader’s engagement by seeing how far they have scrolled through the site. It can be used for knowing how many people scroll, when people navigate & reaches bottom of the page and many more such questions.
You may see decreased rate of bounce with an increase in time on site. A tool like CrazyEgg offers some out of the box functionality and helps you to detect clicks on your site without creating events.
Platinum SEO suggests to measure reader engagement and loyalty for defining the purpose of your site. Without any clear understanding, you will not be able to track and measure right metrics. Do not be too obsessed with tracking engagement as it is intangible. Interact more with the readers to uncover all problems of your site.
