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If increasing revenue is one of your primary business goals, turning your focus toward customer engagement could be a winning strategy. After all, engaged customers — those who browse, share, and immerse themselves in your content — are more likely to become loyal brand advocates over time.
Discover how customer engagement metrics can provide valuable business insights for growth.
Online engagement measures the depth of a shopper’s interaction with your business. It encompasses how they connect with your brand’s digital and online presence, whether it be through your website, social media, or other online platforms.
Online engagement starts with the customer’s first interaction with your business. This could take place through a variety of channels, such as a blog post, digital ad, social media story, or email marketing message. Ideally, the customer (or potential customer) can interact with your business and brand across multiple channels, which can further strengthen the connection the customer experiences with you.1
Creating this connection with customers takes intention, which is why customer engagement metrics are so vital to understanding what’s resonating with them.
Customer’s can engage with your brand digitally in a variety of methods, which might include:
Customer engagement metrics are the data points that quantify how customers interact with your brand online.
From website navigation patterns to social media reactions, these metrics gauge the effectiveness of your content, user interface, and overall digital strategy.
By unlocking the secrets of what resonates with your target audience, you can fine-tune your business and marketing strategy. Metrics can provide insight into your company’s efficiency, quality and profitability, helping you identify areas for improvement. For example, if you find that customers are clicking away from your website, you can aim to improve the content on your site to make it more engaging.
Not sure how to acquire these deep customer insights? Platforms like PayPal offer reporting tools that allow you to track, analyze, and respond to customer behaviors like cart abandonment.
With so many data points and figures to review, website analytics dashboards can feel overwhelming. The good news is there are plenty of tools accessible to help dissect your customer journey, identify what captures shoppers’ attention, and pinpoint potential reasons for their departure.
Here are some key customer engagement metrics to monitor with a website:
Page views represent the total number of times users view or load individual pages on your website.
High page views can be a sign of content that resonates. It may also provide insights on what content is most popular. If you find certain types of content continue attracting page views, then you can optimize other content on your website to mirror what’s working. Using targeted keywords, fast page loading, and internal linking are all examples of optimizing a page and duplicating the success throughout your website.
Keep in mind, higher page views doesn’t always equate to positive engagement. Make sure to analyze page views in conjunction with other customer engagement metrics to understand the complete user engagement story. For example, you should also consider how many times the content is re-shared or how many times someone re-visits a particular page.
Bounce rate reveals the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing just one page. While the visitor starts on a page, bounce rate means the visitor didn’t click on a link, make a purchase, or interact with your content in any form before exiting from the same page.
It’s also a critical indicator of how well your site makes the right first impression. While you can find various answers for what’s considered a good bounce rate, typically a metric of around 40% or lower is considered ideal.2
A high bounce rate serves as a warning that your navigation or landing pages may need improvements. It may indicate your site takes too long to load, isn’t mobile friendly, there’s a lack of optimized content, or the website design is outdated. If you can pinpoint the root cause of a high bounce rate, then you can quickly work on improving it and create more positive engagement.
Pages per session is a critical customer engagement metric. It measures the average number of pages viewed in a single visit, shedding light on the depth of user engagement. The more pages per session, the more you can assume your content is successful at encouraging exploration and discovery.
A strong pages per session rate can indicate your website is:
Session duration, or time on site, reflects the average time users spend per visit. While pages per sessions measures the average number of pages a reader views during one visit, session duration measures the total amount of time they’re spending on your site.
A long average session duration usually means your audience is absorbing and interacting with your content, an indicator that your site experience is compelling and user-friendly. It can also indicate you’re offering high quality content and creating a strong user experience throughout the site.
When we talk about online engagement, social media often takes center stage, and while it’s just one part of the customer journey, there’s a reason it’s an important player.
Use these following social media metrics to unlock insights into how you can transform likes, shares, comments, and follows into tangible growth and enhance your social media marketing strategy.
Social media reach is the total number of unique users who have seen your content. The higher your reach, the greater the visibility of your brand across platforms.
Social media reach is still an important customer engagement metric because it lets you if you’re increasing brand awareness. The more you increase brand awareness, then the greater likelihood you can assume you’re getting in front of potential customers. An increased social media reach can also increase the likelihood that your brand gets noticed and becomes top-of-mind for potential customers.
While social media reach highlights your brand’s exposure, it doesn’t necessarily equal engagement.
Are your followers just viewers, or are they participants, too? A high engagement rate is a sign that your content resonates, sparks conversations, and builds community and is a critical customer engagement metric. Engagement from potential customers comes in the form of clicks, shares, likes, comments, views, saves, and follows.
While each social media platform measures it slightly differently, you can also calculate the engagement rate yourself with a couple of different formulas.
The engagement rate serves as an important part of overall customer engagement metrics because it gives your business a data-based view of how well your content or ads are resonating.
Beyond website and social media analytics, there are other customer engagement metrics you can use for detailed insights. Consider these other metrics that also help unlock a holistic view of your online marketing effectiveness.
Typically gathered through surveys post-interaction or purchase, think of the customer satisfaction score (CSAT) meaning as an indicator of your customers' satisfaction with your products or services. If you’ve ever participated in a quick survey over the phone after you’ve contacted a customer service center, then you’ve experienced post-interaction survey.
Typical questions you might ask in a customer survey could include:
Determining your CSAT score first involves gathering the data. It starts with conducting a customer survey through a variety of channels, including social media, email, SMS, or post-phone call interactions. The surveys are typically short and with simple, straightforward questions. You have the customer answer via a scale (usually one to five, with five being the highest level or most satisfied), which is how you quantify the data.
Once you’ve gathered the data, add up how many respondents answered with either a four or five. Divide the total number of the respondents who answered with a four or five by the total number of respondents overall. The higher the number, then the higher the likelihood you’re achieving overall customer satisfaction.4
Net promoter score (NPS) is another critical customer engagement metric and it goes beyond satisfaction to measure customer loyalty. To find the net promoter score meaning for your business, ask a simple yet important question: How likely are your customers to recommend your business to others?
The NPS helps quantify a customer’s experiences and predict business growth. Like a CSAT score, it relies on asking key questions while using a 0-10 scale.
Depending on how the customers answer each question, a company can determine what group the respondents fall under.
NPS provides insight into the overall perception and trust in your brand, with a high NPS indicating strong customer loyalty and advocacy — key components of long-term business success.
Imagine this: Your analytics show a high click-through rate to product pages but a steep cart abandonment issue afterward. Perhaps the content on these pages isn't meeting users' needs, or maybe it’s the checkout process frustrating them.
This is where understanding conversion meaning and fine-tuning your conversion process comes in. Conversion simply means your customer took the specific action you wanted online, whether it was purchasing a product, visiting your website, signing up for an email newsletter, or adding items to the shopping cart.
Analyzing customer engagement metrics allows you to diagnose and address any problems within your conversion process and along your customer journey map. It pinpoints where potential customers are dropping off, guiding you to make strategic interventions that push more visitors toward the final checkout button, or whatever you define as your goal.
This analytical approach can also uncover hidden opportunities to increase conversion rates. Are visitors lingering on certain pages but not converting? They may need more information or a nudge towards making a purchase.
Taking customer engagement to the next level and improving your customer engagement metrics involves not just attracting users but also bridging the gap between engagement and purchase. It means using an intentional analysis of these key customer engagement metrics so you can identify your biggest opportunities for getting more engaged with potential customers. When the audience feels more connected, interacts more, and increases engagement, it can result in higher conversion rates for you and build a stronger online community.
Engagement and conversions are directly tied to one another, and this is where PayPal Complete Payments comes into play. With PayPal, you can offer a smooth, secure, and versatile checkout experience tailored to your customers' preferences, whether that’s diverse payment options or mobile-friendly processing for on-the-go shoppers, which can lead to an improvement in each of the customer engagement metrics mentioned above.
The result? It may help to achieve a higher likelihood of conversion, more long-term customer loyalty, and reduced cart abandonment.