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Audience engagement is a pipeline to your bottom line, but your engagement may be low if your content strategy doesn’t align with customer pain points. Low audience engagement can be tackled with time and focus, but it’s important to tie audience engagement KPIs to specific goals. This article will discuss eight important web performance KPIs used to connect with your audience, increase engagement, and measure results.
KPIs should stem from a goal or an outcome associated with audience engagement, so you must ask yourself: What audience engagement goals will help the business and its timelines?
To narrow down what kind of goal you’re looking to achieve with your audience, you should first pin it down to an area of the business. Is the purpose related to a specific marketing channel? Are certain products selling better than others? For example, a company that wants to increase its Instagram following by 20% over the next quarter may focus on follower growth and the pathways to get there, like story-related content and how much reach the content is receiving.
Once a business has decided on a goal and a timeline, it can focus on its audience and the questions it needs answers to, or as Bernard Marr calls it, the key performance question (KPQ). A KPQ is intricately tailored to the outcomes a business wants to achieve and should be future-oriented, open-ended, and driven by performance.
If a brand wants to increase its following on a social media channel like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, then some KPQs it might ask to narrow down to KPIs would be:
Qualified leads are a more granular metric to follow than regular leads. Qualified leads are customers who have not only interacted with the brand but have met the criteria of being a high-quality customer, such as their readiness to buy. Qualified leads fall into the following categories:
Conversion rate is the number of goals achieved (i.e., sales, downloads, emails) divided by the number of total interactions. Conversion rate is a great metric to use when considering how much commitment users give the brand because it indicates that they are willing to gain the value offered and what they will provide to get it, like providing an email.
Customer retention is a company’s ability to get customers to buy regularly without going to a competitor. Customer retention is a strong indicator that a brand is keeping its customers happy and engaged and saving money. Acquiring new first-time customers is more expensive than retaining new ones, and repeat customers are likely to offer word-of-mouth marketing that saves companies thousands of dollars in marketing related expenses.
Time on-page is the average amount of time users spend viewing a particular page before going to a new one. This is an important performance metric for audience engagement because it embodies page views and how much time users spend consuming the content on a page. Longer time on page averages means that the content resonates with views enough that they’re taking time to read and engage with what is offered.
The bounce rate or average session time is the duration of time a visitor spends on your website. For example, if your analytics show a trend of a high bounce rate on your landing page, your landing page may not be offering users what they need to solve the problem they came to your page with. Using bounce rate is a way to experiment with a call to action or guide visitors to engage in behavior you want from them.
Content reach shows how many unique users have seen and interacted with your content, while impressions indicate how often your content was organically shared with someone. Though content reach and content impressions are different, both show how your content travels after posting. While beliefs may differ based on the social media channel you’re using, reaches and impressions are excellent indicators of how your content is moving online.
While many website design platforms have integrated analytics on their websites, it’s essential to gather a holistic view of your page with more than one analytics tool. Below are free platforms you can use to assess key performance indicators with websites and marketing channels:
Enhancing engagement requires frequency, diligence, and a lot of customer research. While you may not see a transformation overnight or even after a few weeks, make sure that you stick with your goal for at least the duration of your timeline. If you still aren’t witnessing the audience engagement optimization you’d like to see; you might consider having our digital experts at Tragic Media conduct a website performance optimization audit for your business. Not only does our team have more than a decade of experience boosting website performance, but we’ve supported countless San Diego businesses with transformative design services that boost engagement, increase conversions, and boost ROI.
If you’re interested in scheduling a consultation to optimize your website’s performance, contact us directly today!
Ryesha is a content marketer and writer living in Denver, Colorado. When she's not working, she loves hiking, buying skincare, and going to shows at Red Rocks.
