How to Measure Customer Engagement: 8 of the Most Important Metrics to Track

How to Measure Customer Engagement: 8 of the Most Important Metrics to Track

Customer engagement is complicated. It can be applied to multiple channels — email, social media, mobile, and even your website. Since it’s spread across so many mediums, measuring the success of your customer engagement strategy can be tricky.

However, if you want to analyze your performance and grow your business, you need to know how to measure customer engagement. From a business perspective, it’s easier to convert engaged customers and retain them.

In this article, we’ll demystify how to measure customer engagement and which metrics are important to track it.

1. Comments, Shares, and Likes on Social Media Platforms

Brands use social media to showcase their products and services. The kind of response that the posts receive can be a good indicator of the success of your customer engagement strategy. Likes, shares, and comments on social media posts aren’t just numbers. They can help you gauge the overall sentiment around your brand.

Think about it. If a customer really likes your product, they may leave a comment asking for its price. Or maybe they liked something you posted and shared it on their timeline. That’s the kind of response that tells you they’re interested.

Also, keep in mind that the kind of comments you receive also makes a difference, not just the number of them. If you’re getting positive comments, you should consider it as a win for your customer engagement strategy. You can also use these metrics to compare your engagement to your close competitors.

Until a couple of years ago, even the number of followers was an important factor for measuring engagement. However, with the rise of fake followers, it’s no longer a deciding metric.

2. App Downloads and Usage

Mobile commerce is booming. In fact, retail sales in the US via smartphones are projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18% until 2023. It’s a crucial medium for shoppers. That’s why mobile phones should be a part of your marketing and engagement strategy.

Not sure how to measure customer engagement for mobile? Keep a tab on the number of app downloads you have.

Many ecommerce stores and other businesses have their own websites as well as mobile apps. As a business owner, your focus should be on encouraging your customers to download your app. It can help you retain your customers, engage them, and win their loyalty.

Think about it. If they download your app, you can send them pop-up notifications and inform them about your latest products. Your mobile app can give you an edge over your competitors. When your customers download your app, you become more easily accessible.

Say you get a lot of customers to download your app. What’s next? How do you measure the success of your customer engagement strategy? Sure, the number of app downloads is a tell-tale sign. But there is also more to it.

Checking how often your customers use your app is one of the best ways to measure customer engagement. After all, it’s pointless if your customers download your app, but don’t use it. That’s not the correct way to measure customer engagement. One of the goals of your customer engagement strategy should be to get your customers to use your app often.

To keep track of your customers’ app usage, you can use various mobile analytics tools. Using these tools, you can find out when they opened your app, which product pages they viewed, and more.

3. Bounce Rate

For websites, the bounce rate is an important metric and you shouldn’t neglect to measure it. It can tell you when your customers are bouncing off from your website. It can also show how engaging your site’s pages are for your customers.

If your customers are highly engaged, they are likely to read multiple articles on your website. This would give you a lower bounce rate. Thus, your goal should be to keep your bounce rate low.

According to Google, here is a simple way of measuring this metric:

Bounce Rate = Total number of single-page sessions / Number of total website sessions

Single-page sessions are the ones that don’t show any subsequent hits after getting the first one. These page sessions will show a duration of 0 seconds.

However, keep in mind, that a high bounce rate isn’t always bad. If the overall success of your website’s marketing strategy depends on your visitors checking out more than one page, then it is important.

For instance, when your home page acts like a gateway for the rest of your website, it can keep your customer engagement rate low.

If your customers only view your homepage without checking your products, it’s not good for your business. However, if you own a single-page website, then it doesn’t matter.

4. Event Participation

Many big brands routinely organize events to launch new products, improve their brand visibility, and to create some buzz. Sometimes, using event flyers & brochures distribution as an added advantage to increase offline reach. Not only is it a great way to build your brand’s reputation, but it is also one of the best metrics for measuring customer engagement.

Whether it is a casual party or a professional conference, counting the number of sign-ups you receive shows if your customers are engaged or not. If you keep receiving registrations quickly, you should give yourself a pat on the back. Your customer engagement strategy is on its way to getting some success.

5. Time on Site

The time spent by visitors on your website is one of the best metrics for measuring the success of your customer engagement strategy. If people spend more time on your website, it’ll positively impact your SEO.

In addition, the chances of them purchasing from you also increase as they’ll be spending more time browsing through your products and services. This is why your marketing strategies should include engagement metrics such as this one.

6. Return Users Frequency

If people are coming to purchase from you and not returning for long, it’s perhaps a reason to worry.
This is why you must keep a tab on metrics like the frequency of return users. By doing so, you’ll get a clear idea of how many of your customers are returning to your brand to purchase again, and how frequently.

The shorter the duration, the better your frequency of return users. This, in turn, means that your customer engagement is high. If your number of return users is lower and their frequency is low as well, you may need to look into your product or marketing strategies.

7. Pages Per Session

When it comes to measuring customer engagement, pages per session is an important metric. It shows the number of pages your customers browse through on average.

It can indicate how well the website’s content resonates with them and also gives you an idea if they’re interested in purchasing from you.

If this number is fairly high, it helps with your website’s SEO, as well. It shows that the customers are not just interested in a single page but the entire website.

8. Monthly Active Users

While daily active users may be considered a vanity metric, monthly active users can help you understand your customer engagement in a better manner. By measuring how many customers are actively visiting your website, you can figure out how well your products resonate with them.

Ideally, you should try comparing your daily active users with your monthly active users. This will help you figure out if people are sticking with your website or not returning at all.

9. Custom Events

Which metrics are more unique to your products or services?

If you are an online ecommerce marketplace, then you could measure your repeat purchase rate. It can tell you about the likelihood that someone will come back and order the same product or another product from your site.

You can also look at your returns rate, which refers to how often people request to return a product and ask for a refund.

For UTM.io, we look at “copied link” as an important metric to track customer engagement. It’s a good indicator that a customer has used our product.

Think about which feature or event is a good indicator of customer engagement for your website. This will help you measure how engaged your customers are.

Final Thoughts

If you want to grow your online business, it’s crucial to measure the engagement of your customers. You need to analyze how they interact with your website by looking at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, and pages per session. In addition, you should check the number of likes, comments, and shares your posts get on social media.

You should also check the number of return users and how frequently they return to you. Additionally, you must track your monthly active users and daily active users to see if users are engaging with your website regularly. If you have a mobile app, you should monitor the number of app downloads as well.

Are there other ways to measure customer engagement? Let us know in the comments.

Dan McGaw

Dan McGaw is an award-winning entrepreneur and speaker. He is the founder and CEO of McGaw.io, a marketing technology and analytics agency, and the creator of UTM.io, a campaign management and data governance tool. Named one of the godfathers of the marketing technology stack and one of original growth hackers, Dan has decades of experience in digital marketing, technology, and analytics. (His team won’t let him take this out even though he says it makes him sound old.)

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