10 User Engagement Metrics You Need to Be Measuring

Understanding how users view your company and products based on how they engage with your website makes it easier to invest marketing dollars in the right places, cut what isn't working, and grow your business in a way that keeps customers happy. Like mitochondria in a cell, engagement is the powerhouse of your business.

Tracking user engagement and correctly determining the insights it has to offer can be tricky. So, to get a better handle on how people use your website, products, and services—from the sales process through a lifetime of activity—we've put together a list of ten fundamental metrics to start measuring and understanding.

1. Pages per visit

We'll start with a look at the most likely common metric for user engagement: pages per visit. It should be your go-to when you start thinking about how people use the services, websites, and other content you create.

What is it?

Pages per visit shows how many web pages a user looks at on your site when they visit it. You can break this down by individual users when you have tracking capabilities or you can look at large groups of users to see overall trends.

Most analytic tools will give you an overview of pages per visit, while also highlighting which pages get the most views. Advanced analytics tools can help you take a more in-depth look to see what pages are attracting visitors from different times, locations, referral sources (such as coming from an ad or your Facebook page), and other demographic data.

Why is it important?

The longer a visitor stays on your website, the more likely they are to spend money with you or use other services. So, you’ll want to learn which pages are enticing and engaging. You can focus on creating similar content to these pages while either removing or changing poor-performing pages.

If you have a lot of people viewing just a single page on your site, you’re not reaching the right audience for your business. It’s a warning sign that means you’ll want to check advertising and marketing campaigns, plus potentially redoing your customer research.

Sorting by referral service also helps you understand the value of marketing and sales tactics. If your ad campaigns drive a lot of traffic but those people only view a page or two, you might be targeting the wrong people or sending them to the wrong space.

2. Time on site

Time on site is another metric for establishing a baseline to understand a user's behavior, though it can be more nuanced than it might appear.

What is it?

The "time on site" metric is an attempt to measure how much time users on your website per visit. It can help you understand the people who visit multiple pages on your site. However, this metric is tricky, so you should always use it with various other metrics before taking action.

Why is it important?

Knowing how much time a user spends on your site is essential because it can help determine how engaged they are. The amount of time a user spends on your website can indicate how engaged they are with your content. A shorter time spent on your site may indicate that your audience isn’t receptive enough to the messaging they’re seeing. However, it’s important to factor in the intent of the page. For example, if a user lands on your contact us page, they may just want your phone number and may leave as soon as they’ve retrieved that information.

You’ll want to use your website’s analytics tools to look at how time on site changes over time. For example, say that the time spent on your website increases after you launch a new marketing campaign. That can mean you’re targeting interested customers and could successfully present them with a sales message. However, if the average time spent on your site declines, it could mean that you’re reaching the wrong people.

We do have an important note about this metric. You can’t rely on it by itself because of how it measures site visitors. Say a user comes to your site on page A, moves to page B, and then exits. The technology can determine when that person landed on your site and when they moved to page B, but it won't know how long they spent on page B before leaving. The time spent on site here is all about page A. What's worse is if a user only visits one page and takes no other action. Your analytics don’t have anything to check against and must calculate this person's "time on site" as zero.

That's why it’s a useful metric to have (because you can look for trends over time) but should only be used to help you understand what other data is saying.

3. Bounce Rate

Let's move to one of the most essential user engagement metrics for your website: bounce rate. There are results for other content you create, such as apps or if you make videos for YouTube.

What is it?

Your bounce rate is the percentage of people who come to your website and only view a single page, and generally, they don't take any other action. They won't trigger any other metrics or analytics on your site because they simply arrive and then leave. These people visit and “bounce” away from your site.

Why is it important?

Bounce rate helps you understand how well a page is performing. It contains very useful information, but it always needs to be in context for the specific page you’re analyzing.

A high bounce rate is poor when it occurs on pages where you want a user to take action. If you’re spending money on ads that drive a user to a sign-up page for your newsletter or a coupon, a high bounce rate would mean people clicked the ad but didn’t convert. Thus, you're spending money without a positive return.

For web pages that require another action for success—like buying a product and going to the checkout page—you want to work hard to lower bounce rates.

You can view bounce rates in a more positive light when they're high on pages where you don't need a user to take more action. Pages like your FAQs, blog posts, refunds, or other policy explanations may have higher bounce rates because users come in for information, get it, and leave. Measuring bounce rate on these pages may help you identify opportunities so pay attention to their traffic. For example, if you have a blog post that shows people enjoying your product, consider adding a call-to-action button to help those users share their own experiences.

4. Stickiness

We all want the services and products we offer to be engaging, and stickiness is an effective way to measure how often the people who buy your products think about them and about you.

What is it?

Stickiness is a measurement of how often people return to your website in general, service or login pages, or your app. It compares how many people use your site daily versus monthly.

Stickiness = Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users

So, if you have 250 people using your app each day and a total of 1,000 individuals use your app each month, you will have a stickiness of 25% (250/1000).

Why is it important?

Stickiness allows you to understand how often people think of your brand and want to use what you offer. It’s a top metric for services and apps because it provides a direct look at how engaged your audience is. It can help you determine how likely your current audience is to return to your site and take additional actions. Such actions can include making an additional purchase for products or engaging with subscription content.

If you are a content creator, for example, stickiness can help you understand how much of your audience visits your site multiple times to get new content. You could use that information to inform how often you post or how you let people know about your content.

Stickiness is one of the reasons companies invest in blogs and newsletters. Not only do those elements give you potential SEO boosts, but they can keep driving people back to your site and keep you at top-of-mind when it comes time to use a service or buy a product.

5. Time to display

Let’s take a look at your website itself and metrics that can prevent you from creating an engaging experience.

Online visitors are notorious for being impatient. They want to see and use your site right away. Think about the last time you were on a website that took more than 10 seconds to load. Did you stay there or click away to find something else while it was taking a long time to display?

What is it?

The time to display metric is the amount of time it takes your website or page to display so that a visitor can engage with it, such as reading a blog post or clicking a sales button. Generally speaking, the faster, the better for this metric.

Why is it important?

If your page takes too long to load, people will leave your website. Slow loading times cost companies sales and ad revenue, potentially doing long-term harm to your business. According to some research, many visitors will abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load content. Each additional 1-second delay can reduce your conversion rate by up to 7%.

Regularly check this metric to protect your business. It should also be on the top of your checklist when you make any website changes. If your site is loading slowly, ask a web developer for help reducing the size of the page. This may include removing videos, reducing the sizes of images, or changing how the page displays different elements.

6. First-week engagement

First-week engagement is a favorite metric for whenever you launch something new. This can apply to a new product or service, or even things like the first marketing campaign you run for your site.

What is it?

First-week engagement (also called "week #1 engagement") is a measure of how many people take actions related to your new product or launch within the first week it is available. If you offer services or an app, this metric can be used to see how often people use your offering in the first week after they sign up.

Less commonly, it can be used as a metric for new products to help determine their reach and appeal to the traffic you're able to generate.

Why is it important?

First-week engagement shows how engaging users find your new content or product. It can signal if you’re reaching the right people or need to change your marketing strategy (either spending differently or targeting differently) to reach people who want what you’re selling.

It’s a helpful tool for determining how much marketing to spend on a project. If you sell digital content, high first-week engagement could demonstrate that you want to increase advertising to reach more people like your audience. Likewise, businesses that rely on subscription revenue use this metric to see if people paying for a service use it shortly after the sale. Higher engagement can mean you’re at a lower risk of losing subscribers when it is time to renew the subscription.

If these engagement numbers are low, you'll want to act quickly. Review the process for people to onboard and start using your offering. Conduct a QA audit of the page to see if it’s too demanding or broken. Ask users about their experience to see if part of the interface is too confusing.

In some cases, it's also a signal that your current training and support are complicated. Instead of giving people a single PDF with all of the instructions, consider making a series of short videos on getting started and using core features so people can quickly find what they need or get help with common tasks.

7. Feature usage

Sticking with our theme of services and apps for another metric, here’s a useful one to track to see if you're offering what people want or if you have something extra that can be cut from your development and maintenance schedules.

What is it?

Feature usage tracks how much your regular customers use any given feature you offer. It's best to track this across every feature so your teams can see what is or isn't being used, plus understand what your customers value.

You can apply feature usage to almost anything on your website, allowing for some creative analytics. While companies like banks track it to see how often users login and access an account, an ecommerce company can use the metric to see how often customers use a chatbot or customer service chat.

Why is it important?

Feature usage shows you what your customers find valuable. Context is important to understand what that value means. Core features of your service that are used regularly show where people are willing to spend their time and money. This points to where you’ll want to invest and continue to improve.

If you’re seeing support tools have high feature usage, it means customers value your service but need help using it. So, pair the high feature usage with data on what questions customers ask. This will help you to see where you should improve the user interface or tool functionality to be more in line with what customers want. Theys also might express dissatisfaction about something taking too many steps, which would show you what’s getting in the way of offering a more engaging service.

This metric helps you prioritize what customers like and avoid spending unnecessary funds to develop features that your community doesn't use or want.

One quick note about feature usage is that you want to ask customers why they do or don't use a certain feature before you make a substantial change. You might have something people don't need or a feature they like but the current option is too time-consuming to use regularly. Customers may also love your service but only need to use it once a month.

8. Cost per acquisition

For sales companies, we've now landed on one of the most important metrics for understanding how well you're doing and when you might need to try something new.

What is it?

The cost per acquisition (CPA) shows much money you spend to gain each new customer. The metric is easiest to analyze over time, such as over the course of a month. You compare all of the advertising, marketing, and other expenses occurred in pursuit of customers and how many new customers you gained in that period of time. Advanced ecommerce, ERP, marketing, and other programs can help you track this more precisely so you can properly attribute customer acquisition to these efforts.

CPA is tied directly to your marketing, helping you know if you earned more than was spent for a campaign.

Why is it important?

Cost per acquisition is one of the most critical measurements of engagement and interaction for a marketer to track. CPA lets you know what efforts are working and helps determine when strategies should be changed. Your business is in trouble if CPA rises higher than the revenue that these new customers bring in regularly.

If you spend $500 on a new ad campaign in Google related to your products, and you then track that 25 new customers purchased because of those ads, that would mean you essentially spent $20 to acquire each new customer. If these customers' average order value was more than $20, you've likely made a profit from the campaign.

If your customers spend $12 on average, this campaign likely didn't generate enough new customers to be worth the time and money. This warning sign should send you deep into your sales data to see where these people spent money and if you can reach them in a more affordable way or if you need to change who you’re targeting and how you’re marketing.

9. Retention rate

When you want to know how often past shoppers come back to your website, you'll need to calculate your retention rate.

What is it?

The retention rate is a measure that shows what percentage of past customers return to your website after they've completed a purchase. This is a broad metric and will help you understand how much people think about you and your brand.

Why is it important?

It’s generally cheaper to retain a customer and get them to purchase from you again than it is to go out and find new customers. That makes retention rate useful for a few reasons.

First, retention rate helps companies predict what kinds of shoppers are likely to buy from you again. When a user visits your site a month or two after a purchase, they're probably looking to make another purchase. This is great because it can signify engagement and satisfaction.

Give these users reasons to come back, such as offering a newsletter or emailing discounts and product announcements. When a user signals they’re willing to return to your site and look around again, you want to make it easy and compelling for them to buy.

Retention rate can also help you look for other areas where you need to provide support. If you have a large number of customers captured by this metric but they're returning just a few days after a sale, it may mean you need to provide more help or information during the sales process. They might be coming back to use your chat support to get shipping details or ask about a surprise charge.

When possible, track who comes back and try to determine why. Focusing your retention rate metrics in this way can guide you to offering a more useful service and help drive people to the right spots to become repeat buyers.

10. Customer lifetime value

Our final metric is especially important for understanding your company’s sales potential. Customer lifetime value is a way to predict how much a customer buys from you over the course of your entire relationship.

What is it?

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a forecast of how much revenue you will generate with a customer over the entire course of your interactions. While it’s based on past data, CLV is a prediction. It calculates what you expect current customers to ultimately buy, so it can increase or decrease based on what happens in your business.

CLV is your best guess of how much a customer or group of customers are worth to your business on average. It can help you determine which groups of people are most likely to keep buying from you and where you can focus efforts to generate more recurring revenue.

Why is it important?

CLV is a signal for what your company should do next with a customer. If a customer has a significant value left, keep sending messages and encouraging sales. When they reach the end of your projected CLV, reduce the amount of time and money you spend trying to market and reach these customers.

Think of it like being a concession stand at a baseball game. You want to get customers to your stand as soon as they arrive in the park, because that way there’s more time for them to come back and buy another hotdog or soda. However, you likely don’t want to spend a lot of money trying to reach people after the game is over and they all head to the parking lot to try and beat traffic, especially if their team lost.

If young men will spend an average of $120 over their entire engagement with you, but older men with children will spend closer to $500, it is more valuable for your business to acquire older customers. Adjust your marketing and sales materials to reach them and increase revenue potential. Pairing CLV with CPA data is a smart way to adjust marketing tactics to reach the best customers in the most affordable way.

Continually tracking this metric also helps identify spending changes. If you notice the CLV of one group starts to decline rapidly, you can review changes you made or look for larger cultural trends that might be causing your audience to shift.

Accurately predicting requires a sophisticated setup and a historical set of data. You'll need to get people to create accounts with some information so you can track their entire purchase history and have enough to determine what characteristics set different customers apart.

Let your people guide you

A successful business is driven by its customers. All the metrics on our list are designed to help you listen to customers and users and act based on their feedback. Engagement is extremely valuable when it’s the driving force for change and growth at your company.

The people who rely on what you offer will have thoughts and ideas on what works, what doesn't, and what they want to see next. If you start tracking these metrics but still aren't sure what to do next, ask your customers. They're the best support group you can have to grow and succeed.