Engagement metrics are the top-level KPIs that can easily be found in Google Analytics or standard SEO tools. While there is an enormous number to choose from, and they often go by various names, we’ve compiled a list of must-know engagement metrics to get you started:
- Pageviews.
- Pages per session.
- Average session duration.
- Unique visitors.
- Bounce rate.
- Average time on page.
- Time on site.
- Traffic source.
- Event tracking.
- Conversion rate.
- Scroll depth.
- Dwell time.
- Abandonment rate.
For greater context, let’s explore some of the driving factors behind engagement metrics and how you might decide which ones are best aligned with your marketing goals.
What Are Engagement Metrics?
Engagement metrics are indicators of how users — site visitors, customers, employees, etc. — interact with your media properties, e.g., your website, social media profiles, application, portal, software or content.
For the purposes of this post, we’ll be focusing on visitors to a website.
Sometimes referred to as consumption or behavioral metrics, engagement metrics are the measurement of how and how much users engage with what you post online. In total, webmasters and marketers can get a good idea — quantitatively and qualitatively — of which types of topics, content formats and messages are best received by their intended target audience.
With this information, you can plan future marketing campaigns around data-backed, historically engaging themes.
It’s also important to note that an engagement metric can be an easily misrepresented, overly broad term. By default, Google Analytics and other tools will register all engagement that occurs on a site. But you may want to view only customer engagement one day vs. non-employee engagement the next.
This means you’ll need to create separate views with clear intent and labels behind them. For example, filtering out all company- and employee-related IP addresses will show you a truer metric value (since you don’t really create content for your own staff to click on — they will skew your reporting).
Preliminary time spent designing and filtering your trackable views will make each engagement metric that much more meaningful.