Top 12 Website Engagement Metrics To Track In 2022

In this article, I will talk about fundamental website engagement metrics you should know about. Knowing these metrics is vital for increasing your user activation rate through creating engaging content for your customer base. 

If you are interested in understanding your website’s engaging metrics, this is the article for you. 

Bounce Rate

Bounce refers to the number of users who visit your website and, instead of checking out other pages in your website, simply check out another website or log out from the internet. Bounce Rate is calculated by dividing the number of individual visits to your website by the total visits made to your website.

You should want your Bounce Rate to be as low as possible. The lower your bounce rate is means the more customers are engaged with your product. Your bounce rate is especially important for enabling your potential customers to enter a SaaS sales funnel. This is a metric often tracked by SaaS companies like Netflix and Youtube.

You might ask how to reduce your Bounce Rates, do not worry; here is a list of steps you should take to reduce your Bounce Rate:

1. Learn What Drives Your Visitors Away

By utilizing a tool like Hockeystack, you will be able to generate a heatmap for your website. This heatmap will allow you to track which sections of your website draw the interest of your visitors. Tracking these metrics means that you will be able to adjust and fix the factors that drive your visitors away.

2. Have a Proper Colour Palette

One of the important factors when a new person visits your website is its color scheme. By utilizing colors related to your software, or simply colors that are in cohesion with one another, you will be able to draw the attention of your visitors.

For example, the HockeyStack blog mainly utilizes turquoise, white, and black. These colors are not only used in the website but also utilized in the Hockeystack software tool as well.

3. Track Their Movements

By utilizing a plugin for your website, you can adjust your website to show special warning messages to visitors who are about to leave. You can use these messages to inform your visitors of special discounts that they can utilize.
Here are some ways you can utilize plugin messages for:

• Inform your visitors of your newsletter and how to subscribe to it.
• Give your visitors information regarding your discounts.
• Direct your customers to the E-Books you have written.

4. Use Interactive Content

By providing your users with interactive content pieces they can use, you will be able to not only draw their attention but make them do your job for you. Including little questionnaires on your website will allow you to track certain trends in your customer base. You can conduct Churn Surveys through this method as well. 

CTR

CTR, which is abbreviated for Click-through rate, refers to the number of people who click your links compared to the ones who don’t. This metric is especially important for your marketing campaigns since it directly affects advertisement efficiency. You calculate this metric by dividing the number of your click-throughs by the total number of impressions your website has had.
Here is a short diagram explaining how to calculate your click-through rate:

Although the ideal click-through rate changes according to your website and advertisements, you want this number to be as high as possible. Here are some ways you can increase your click-through rate:

1. Know What Your Audience Wants

Before promoting advertisements, you should decide whether or not your audience is interested in them. Nothing you will do with your ads and website will be useful unless your visitors are related to the ads in one way or another.

Of course, you can not find an advertisement that all of your customers are interested in; however, you should always strive to find ads that appeal to a wider proportion of your customer base.

2. Provide Your Visitors with Benefits

Your visitors should know that clicking a link on your website provides them with benefits. You can designate multiple aspects of your website around this rule. For example, allowing your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter through a link is a great way to attract their attention.

Here are some of the benefits you can utilize to increase your click-through rate:

• Subscription to your Newsletter
• Free Ebook
• 14-Day Free trials
• Schedule a free consultation

Average Session Duration

Average Session Duration, as it can be deducted from the name, refers to the time period an average visitor spends on your website. These durations are calculated according to sessions. A session starts when a visitor visits your website and lasts until 30 minutes of inactivity.

This 30-minute rule is aimed at preventing your Average Session Duration from being inflated due to being away from keyboard users. These users could have simply left your website open on their computer and gone on to do other things.

Calculating your average session duration is usually done through software tools like HockeyStack.

Here are some of the ways by which you can increase your Average Session Duration:

1. Use Images

One of the important aspects of producing content is using images. Images play a strong role in breaking monotonicity and drawing the attention of your users. In addition to increasing your average session duration, putting links regarding where you got the pictures from can help to increase your marketing reach.

However, do consider creating your own images as well. Creating your own images will help your website to have a personalized feel to it.

2. Keep an Eye on Your Metrics

You need to figure out what drives your customers away before taking any steps. Knowing your metrics like bounce rate, ROI, and the net-promoter score is important for increasing your Average Session Duration.

Keeping an eye on your metrics with the help of a software tool like HockeyStack is especially important. Since these tools will enable you to make sense of the distinct metrics, you will face. You will also be able to make comparative analyses of your website through these software tools.

3. Linking to Your Existing Content

Using natural linking methods to point out other content on your website is a great way to draw attention to your product and increase your Average Session Duration. You will get more exposure to your product by utilizing links.

4. Make Sure you Have a User-Friendly Interface

If your user interface seems clunky, your users can be put off from hanging out on your website. You should want your user-friendly to be as easy to use as possible to make them invest in your software.

5. Have a Solid Product

Designing your website in a solid way, using images, tracking your metrics are all important things that are obvious. However, you must have an overall solid product for your customers to be attracted to your website in the first place.

However, for you to produce a solid product, you need to understand how marketing works. This might seem like a weird comment to put out at first, so let me elaborate further. Before creating a product, you need to determine whether your company will focus on inbound or outbound marketing.

Deciding on your approach will enable you to design your product development scenario, thus enabling you to plan out how much you will spend in which section of your brand.

Time On Page

Time On Page refers to the time a user spends on a certain page in your website while visiting your website. This time is calculated by finding the duration between when a visitor enters a page and when they go on to check out another page.

Calculating this metric goes hand-in-hand with calculating your average session duration. Comparing these two metrics will enable you to calculate which web pages in your website draw more attention compared to other ones.

Increasing your Time On Page is pretty similar to increasing your Average Session Duration; however, there are some tactics you can utilize to specifically improve your Time On-Page as well.

• Designing your links to open in new windows will allow your users to stay on a specific page while they visit your website.
• Adding videos to your website will increase your average time on a page since some of the visitors will view the videos.
• Adding a chat plugin to your website can help your customers to get into contact with you, thus enabling them to spend more time in an individual web page of your website.

Conversion Path

Conversion Path refers to the path a visitor employs up until the point you designate them to arrive. This point can range from simply creating an account for your website to subscribing to your newsletter. The end of the Conversion Path is up to you.

Conversion Path is a basic way to calculate how successful your website design is when it comes to achieving the goals designated by you. This metric provides you with flexibility for determining your starting and ending point.

You can also combine the conversion path with other metrics such as the visitors’ time on page, Average Session Duration, and Bounce Rate to better understand what visitors go through while they visit your website.

Here are some of the important terms related to your Conversion Path:

• The landing page is the page often designed by website owners to be the very first page when new visitors enter their website. This page is often the entry page for your website.
• A thank you web page refers to the page your visitors are directed to after they complete a task that is related to your website. This term usually defines the end of the conversion path.
• Call-to-action refers to a page where you encourage your users to try out something related to your product. This is a great way to increase the efficency you get from your conversion path.
• Flushing out your existing product and making test runs to fix any bugs is a great way to make the entire journey for your visitors much easier.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to the rate of customers who have completed their conversion path. This rate is calculated by dividing the total number of customers who have completed their conversion path by the total number of impressions you have had in a certain period.

One of the benefits of calculating your Conversion Rate is that you can calculate it according to which time period you would like. This is especially useful for companies that see a rise in seasonal trends. They will be able to calculate their conversion rate more independently, regardless of the time period.

You should want your Conversion rate to be as high as possible. The average conversion rate for most of the websites is around 2.31%. However, note that this changes according to your aims and the type of website you have.

Here are some of the ways you can increase your conversion rate:

1. Try Out A/B Testing

Testing is always important. This is especially true for SaaS marketing. You need to try out different website designs and different models to figure out what your visitors would like. A/B testing refers to trying out two different models at the same time.

One of the benefits of this method is that you will get results for both simultaneously. This enables you to make comparisons without conducting longer experiments.

2. Be Clear About What You Present

Your visitors will be more inclined to check out what you present to them if you present them with a clear message. You should always strive to be direct and open with your messages so as not to confuse your visitors.

This also applies to the software you present your users with as well. You need both of them to be clear and connect and complement each other without hassle. Increasing the integration between your website and software is a great way to pique customers’ interest.

3. Create a Sales Funnel for Your Website

Having a plan is always a must when you are dealing with marketing. Your marketing should have certain goals, methods, and finishing points. You can achieve all of these by creating a sales funnel for your website.

By having a Sales Funnel, you will be able to direct a visitor who wants to learn about a simple term to subscribe to your product.

Signups Per Referrer

Signups per referrer refer to how many of your existing customers (referrers) bring new customers. Creating a signup program for your existing users is a great way to increase brand loyalty for your product.

You can set up a referrer program for plenty of things on your website. These things can range from inviting your members to attract new subscribers to your services to have them help you find people to create new accounts.

Referrer programs are a strong way to increase the number of customers you reach and are also utilized by many more prominent companies. For example, Evernote is a great example of a useful referrer system that you can use as an example.

Enter/exit Pages

Enter Page is a page that most of your customer base sees when they visit your website. Although this can change according to your website, most of the time, this is your website’s homepage. Your enter page is also often your website’s most interacted page. Thus you should maximize the advertising functionality of this page.
Exit Page, on the other hand, is the page where your customers visit last. This does not necessarily mean that your exit pages are bad. If you have a high conversion rate, this could mean that people fulfill their customer journey and simply want to log off. Either way, people can not hang around on your website forever.
You can learn about your enter and exit pages and how to optimize them for your website by utilizing a tool like HockeyStack. Hockeystack also allows its users to combine these metrics with other ones to create an in-depth analysis for your website.

Pages Per Visit

This metric refers to how many pages were viewed per visit. This metric is also referred to as Pages/Visit. As you can understand from Pages per visit’s short name, Pages per visit is calculated by taking an average of how many pages an average visitor visits.

This metric is quite important for calculating how successful your website is in drawing new visitors to your website. The more web pages visitors visit while viewing your website, the more efficient your website design is.

This metric can be used comparatively with time on page, session duration, and scroll depth to better calculate the efficiency of your website.

The overall standard for pages per visit is usually two pages. However, pretty much like all other metrics mentioned in this article, this number changes according to both your website and the other websites in your field. However, this rate of visited pages can go up to five if you are really good at what you’re doing.

However, don’t forget that your pages per visit ratio can go up if you have a lot of new visitors coming in. So, you should take into account how many new visitors you have compared to earlier periods to get a clear view of your pages per visit statistic.

Here are some tips to increase your average pages per visit:

1. Keep Your Visitors Yearning for More

One of the important aspects of increasing your average pages per visit is to make your visitors think they can learn more from visiting your website. You can achieve this by cliffhangers, providing more expectations for your user base.

Having a conclusion for your texts is also useful. In that section, you can also suggest your viewers check out other pages on your website. This is a great way to market your product.

2. Improve Your Website’s Speed

Although this might seem like an unimportant point in 2022, your website’s speed is not only limited to how fast the individual pages open. You should provide an easy-top understand website design for your visitors. Having an interactive website design will help them to surf your website further.

Daily Visits

Daily visits refer to how many visits, on average, your website gets in a day. This is an important metric to track since it directly affects how advertising on your website does.

To calculate this metric, you need to set yourself a time period. Add all the number of visitors who have visited your website in that period, and divide it by the number of days in your period.

This flexibility allows you to calculate daily visits according to weeks, months, and years. However, calculating it every week might cause problems since it is a relatively short time period. Calculating your daily visits monthly or annually is a more reliable method to reach proper statistics.

Here are some of the ways you can increase the daily visits made to your website:

• Give daily awards to your visitors.
• Produce daily content.
• Write engaging content.

New Visitors

New visitors refer to the visitors that actually visit your website for the first time. This metric represents how much of the crowd you pull has joined you in later dates. You can utilize the number of your new visitors to rate how well your marketing strategies are doing lately. You can also designate which sorts of advertisements will be shown on your website.

Here are some of the ways you can increase the number of visitors coming to your website:

1. Create a Foundation for your Visitors to Share Their Experiences

Having a comment section on your website or even going so far as to share opinion pieces by your followers are great ways to draw new visitors. This will not only create natural interaction between your customers but will draw new people due to the keyword usage.

2. Use Ads

Throughout this text, I have analyzed the different ways you can increase the efficiency of advertisements on your website; however, you can also buy ads to be displayed on other websites as well. Using ads is a great way to draw new visitors to your website.

However, do consider utilizing a tool like Hockeystack before buying ad spaces. These software tools can help you to determine which websites would draw more visitors to your own product.

Returning Visitors

Returning visitors is the number of visitors that have been to your website before. This is an important metric since it allows you to calculate the portion of the users who have been to your website compared to those who did not.

This is a great way to calculate how successful your marketing strategies are. Even if they do not spend any money on your website, a returning visitor still possesses the potential to spend money on your products.

These returning visitors are more prone to user activation as well. If they visit your page again, this means that they are prone to pay for your product as well. However, this goes both ways. The users who have had the process of the user activation are more to be returning visitors as well.

Here are some ways to increase the rate of your returning visitors:

• Start a newsletter and suggest it to your returning visitors.
• Get people to follow you on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
• Release new content regularly to keep the interest of your visitors
• Give special privileges to your returning visitors.

Scroll Depth

Scroll Depth is a measurement metric that aims to track how much of any web page on your website is viewed. Scroll Depth takes into account, as you could have deduced from the name, how much the user has scrolled while viewing a page.

Although scroll depth is not able to give you 100% certain information regarding whether or not a viewer is actually engaging with your website, it is a more reliable term compared to time on page and average session duration.

Scroll depth is an important metric to make comparisons with other metrics mentioned in this article. By utilizing this metric, you can calculate how engaging your content is to the customers. The main way to increase this metric is to create engaging content. Here are some of the ways you can produce engaging content:

• Use Headers.
• User Pictures.
• Be aware of what your audience wants.
• Use Keywords to connect your articles.
• Be consistent in your writing.

Conclusion

In this article, I have analyzed different metrics that can be used for your SaaS business and explained how you could improve them. Since this is a relatively long text, feel free to read it as long as you would like and check it out later.

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