Killer KPIs: Percent Engaged Visitors
This post is the first in a series that will highlight key performance indicators (KPIs) to include in your measurement arsenal for keeping your organization focused on the metrics that matter.
There’s a lot of buzz these days about driving greater online engagement on your website or in your community from customers, prospects, employees, or any specific targeted audience. This is essentially accomplished by creating and delivering the quality content, features, or tools your audiences want or need.
What constitutes engagement and how we measure it will always vary depending on the organization, users, content, and context. By asking this question of the key stakeholders in your company, you’ll provoke a discussion that will bring to the surface many of the key measurement challenges to overcome. Examples can include:
Video content can command and keep attention. Which videos are most important? Is our content fresh and relevant? Is it being published in a way that is user friendly and can we accurately measure views, shares, and completion rates? Can we map these metrics back to traffic source?
- Product views: Which product lines should we focus on? What number of product views most often results in an eventual purchase?
- White papers: Consumption of whitepapers by target audiences can be a conversion in itself, but definitely translates to engagement. Next steps will include assigning the creation of the content and evaluating whether or not lead generation and CRM systems and processes are properly in place.
- Comments published on discussion forums, community areas, or product review sections. Can you easily determine the number of comments per category of your site or community? Does the data differentiate between visitors’ comments and your internal employees?
- Rating of content or features: Caring enough to rate/Like a product or feature indicates interest and serves as a good supporting metric. How well are these functions integrated into the user experience of your site or community?
- Sharing content across social media via tools such as AddThis or ShareThis. These may not be integrated, or you may have to track down who owns the account in order to view the share data.
- Search: Are visitors actively searching for your content? Consider both external searches as well as internal. Evaluate whether the queries entered into your internal search box are being captured.
- Pages per visit: How deep is their session? Depending on your users’ goals, a deep session may or may not actually be desirable. In some instances, viewing many product pages, or consuming a number of videos is beneficial to the organization. On the other hand, the user should only have to view as few support pages as possible before finding the answer to their question.
- Time on site: Similar to pages per visit, the sweet spot for time on site can be low or high depending on content types and the overall goals of the site.
- Number of visits in a certain timeframe: Increasing the number of repeat visitors is the goal of most sites and communities. You’ll want to set your own targets in terms of what’s achievable and desired.
Create an “Engaged Visitors” Segment
Each of the above activities generates data (if configured to do so). The first step is to ensure there are no data gaps so the desired action can actually be measured. For instance, you may need to utilize event tracking to verify when white papers are downloaded or, your site has an internal search function, but it may not be integrated with your primary web analytics tool.
Once data gaps are closed and the proper data is flowing in, you can create an “Engaged Visitors” segment in your analytics tool to group the metrics your team has agreed upon and their related thresholds together. Once applied to your standard reports, you’ll be able to tell what traffic sources, campaigns, regions and keywords are driving quality traffic to your site.
Turn this into a percentage of overall traffic and you have a Killer KPI.
