No doubt, the idea of having thousands or millions of users is appealing. But what happens if all those visitors to your site leave without buying anything? Yes, the numbers are high, but it’s all for nothing if it’s not growing your business. That’s why user engagement is a crucial metric.
In fact, brands that have mastered the art of engagement were 41% more likely to report “much higher” conversion rates. In other words, engagement pays.
In today’s blog post, we’ll cover everything you need to know, including how to measure and improve engagement.
What Is User Engagement?
Firstly, the question at the center of all this is: what is user engagement? This metric basically determines how much users of your digital product engage with your brand. Simple, right? If you engage your users, they might just come back.
You can measure user engagement in a lot of ways. For example, someone who signs up for your newsletter through a pop-up on your site is engaged. If they comment on a blog post, they’re engaged, or if they share your content.
By the way, there’s also customer engagement to think about. Customer engagement is similar, but it relates specifically to your customers. This includes those visiting physical stores and engaging with your brand in other ways. Typically, you have more information about customers, including their demographic information. However, a user is anyone who stumbles across your site. And they’re not all customers.
With all these ways to determine engagement, it’s surprisingly easy to convert visitors into engaged users. Now, you just need to know why it matters.
Why Is User Engagement Important?
For many firms, engagement is a key performance indicator (KPI). It shows that you can earn client loyalty, which you need to turn a profit and expand your business.
Actively engaged users are more likely to share and interact with your content or even buy from your business. They might even purchase from you multiple times. In fact, there’s a better opportunity to upsell to users with a high engagement.
For example, let’s say you offer a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. High engagement is what encourages users to sign up for the premium version. Offering exceptional user experience (UX) is the only way to really drive these sales.
User Engagement Metrics to Track
There’s more than one way to measure engagement. This is why you need to learn the relevant user engagement metrics. Depending on your specific goals, not all will be important. You can focus on whichever metrics best suit your business and your product.
Here are seven user engagement metrics in more detail.
1. Active Users
Websites and apps track the number of active users to get a wide snapshot of their overall audience. You can measure this across different timeframes, including daily active users (DAU) or monthly active users (MAU).
By calculating this as a percentage of your total audience, you can determine the engagement of your user base.
2. Session Length and Intervals
Session length refers to the amount of time (in minutes) a user spends on a website or app. Meanwhile, session intervals are how much time passes between a user’s visits to the same site or app.
These both show how much time the user spends on a product. This shows how much value the user gets out of the product.
3. Stickiness
The “stickiness” of an app refers to how long users spend on it. If they return to an app regularly, it’s “sticky.”
You can measure this in a few ways, including:
- DAU and MAU, which should both be high
- Low churn rate
- High user engagement rate
- High retention rate
4. Retention Rate
Speaking of retention rate, this is the percentage of users who return to a digital product over time. If you get a lot of repeat users, your product is usable and engaging, which are both great signs!
5. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate refers to the percentage of users who complete a desirable action. This could be signing up for an email newsletter or making a purchase, for example. More often than not, it’s about making purchases, though it depends on the goal of your campaign.
A high conversion rate means that your users are very engaged with your brand.
6. Churn Rate
The churn rate is the percentage of users who leave an app or product over time. High churn means people are abandoning the product, which means engagement is low. Your job is to find out why people are leaving and how to stop them.
7. User Engagement Rate
Overall, the engagement rate is the percentage of users who engaged with your brand at all. It is a combination of all the other metrics.
How To Collect User Feedback
With all these metrics, you need a way to measure them. There are a couple of options, including collecting qualitative feedback directly from users and gathering quantitative data through tests.
User feedback is invaluable. Not only does it tell users what you’re thinking, but it also shows your users that you value their opinions. We suggest using a combination of qualitative methods and in-the-wild feedback from real-time analytics tools.
Anything that lets you tap into your users’ feelings is a good start. Let’s cover two methods in more detail: surveys and user testing.
Testing With a User Engagement Survey
Sending our surveys might seem annoying, but it’s a great way to test engagement. After all, the responses will come from those who actually want to provide feedback.
If you word the questions well, a user engagement survey can really tell you everything you need to know. In fact, you can split the questions into various categories. Each one will tell you something interesting about your audience.
Here are some great engagement survey questions:
- How often do you read or engage with our content, like newsletters or blogs?
- How responsive do you find our customer support team on social media?
- Have you ever participated in any of our loyalty rewards programs?
- Have our products/services ever surpassed your expectations?
- On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your satisfaction with our products/services?
- How would you rate the value for money of our products/services?
- How likely are you to remain a customer in the next twelve months?
- How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
- Do you feel that our company caters to your specific needs?
- How would you describe your emotional connection to our brand?
- Are there products or services you wish we offered?
- What factors could prevent you from purchasing from us again in the future?
- How would you rate the consistency of our product/service quality?
- Are there parts of our service you think we could improve?
- How easy is it to find the information you need when using our platforms?
All of these questions can provide valuable information. You can send these surveys independently or use a tool. However, crucially, you need to avoid leading questions.
Measuring Engagement in User Testing
Quantitative data comes from extensive user testing. Whether it’s using analytics tools like Google and Hotjar or running lab tests, you need this data. To be honest, a lot of user engagement is just trial and error.
You get feedback, so you decide to make a change. But you can’t implement that change without extensive A/B testing and other usability tests. Naturally, this takes time, but it’s worth it to ensure you’re on the right track.
Testing is crucial whether you’re introducing new advanced features or fixing a bug, so don’t ever neglect it.
How To Increase User Engagement
So, you’ve measured your user engagement; now it’s time to increase it. For the record, a “good” user engagement rate depends on your industry. Ideally, you should judge it against your own metrics instead of competing all the time. Base your success on what you have managed to produce before.
From there, you can start to increase user engagement by starting with goals. You should set measurable, time-constrained goals that you can use to produce your strategy. Then, follow these steps.
1. Design a User Engagement Strategy
You first need an action plan. Try to break down the data you gathered from user feedback, and then start to formulate your plan. Think about what you already have, and then think about what you can change to make it better.
For example:
- Website layout: Is there an aspect of the user interface you can change to make navigation easier?
- Copy: Is your copy (and microcopy) both clear and engaging?
- Accessibility: Is your website both accessible and inclusive?
- Ease of use: Can users immediately understand what they need to do?
See how a lot of these relate to UX/UI design. That’s often the case for engagement. If your digital product isn’t intuitive and logical, engagement will be low.
Try to stick to usability heuristics wherever possible to make sure things are easy for your users.
2. Optimize Every Touchpoint
Users will interact with your company at many different stages, and each one is a touchpoint. If you want the highest engagement possible, you must optimize each and every touchpoint.
Here, we return to testing. You need to A/B test everything in an effort to reach optimization. Thus, it’s time to adopt a customer-first approach. Human-centered design (and, indeed, user-centered design) will vastly help you in this endeavor.
UX aside, you also need to optimize touchpoints like marketing channels and customer service. Remember, every interaction counts!
Why Emotional Design Matters
So far, everything sounds so practical. It’s all surveys and data-based usability testing, but what about human-centered design? Every person who uses your product is a human being. So, you need to appeal to human nature.
Everything around us elicits an emotion. We experience emotional reactions to our environment all the time, whether that’s surprise, frustration, dislike, or joy.
This is a central tenet of UX. Whether you’re trying to or not, as a UX designer, you’re always provoking an emotion in your users. The question is whether you want to frustrate or delight them.
UX design should, in an ideal world, provoke positive emotions. But to do that, you need to make something that’s both usable and useful. Emotional design, then, is all about how a design affects the user. It means designing in a way that affects the user:
- Viscerally
- Behaviorally
- Reflectively
Your UX strategy should include designing for the entire human experience. Try to leverage the power of emotions in everything you design. Pro tip: you can only do this through extensive user experience testing that identifies pain points among your audience. When you know how to leverage and fix these problems, you will provoke positive emotions in your users.
Master Engaging Design With Page Flows
By now, it should be obvious that engagement is a key metric for any business with a website. You need your customers to interact with you, and user engagement is the best way to track this interaction. The best way to relate this to UX is with the old adage: if you build it, they will come. Focus on building a great website, and your users will love it.
So, now you just need to seek design inspiration. Why not learn from proven products? Page Flows is a helpful resource for finding engaging design ideas. Get started today to access our growing library of user flow recordings and finally stay up-to-date with current design trends.
