Are You Boring Your Users? Benchmarking Engagement Metrics for Success

What if I told you that, on average, 43% of online news readers bounce from a website after viewing only one page? Or that Americans spend about 6 minutes and 30 seconds shopping online before losing interest?

Are you surprised by these metrics? Or unimpressed?

Whatever your reaction, defining customer engagement on your website is critical to any digital research strategy. Because an engaged user converts and returns, time and time again.

But how can you be sure that your customers are happy? Although your engagement metrics tell a story, they don’t paint the full picture. Like most measures of the online world, user engagement metrics vary based on industry. Understanding if your customers are happy or not depends on your competition.

Here’s my challenge to you – start benchmarking your engagement metrics. You’re probably already familiar with the process, especially if you compare acquisition, traffic, or monetization metrics against your industry standards.

Benchmarking user engagement is a way of looking at your stats side-by-side with your competitors or the industry standard. It’s a way for you to contextualize customer happiness, reach your target audience, and set a baseline for performance.

Let’s dive in.

Engagement metrics that matter

Engagement rate in the digital world is so much more than just how many times a user clicks on your site. It includes all the metrics that provide information regarding the quality or quantity of engagement with your website or app. It can also be a good measure of the quality of traffic to your website and audience loyalty.

Any KPI that reveals how visitors interact with your website, such as session duration, pages per visit, bounce rate, or click-through rate (CTR), falls under the category of user engagement metrics. When looking at mobile app engagement, these metrics should also include measurements for daily active users, monthly active users, and periodic downloads.

There are various potential metrics you could use to measure a user’s satisfaction, but not all will be significant for you, especially in the digital world.

See how much you’re worth

It’s pretty straightforward: your engagement level is directly related to your profitability. High user engagement is a sign that your content or product is valuable to the user, and will almost always result in higher revenue.

You can view engagement level as an indicator of customer satisfaction. After all, only satisfied customers stay and come back for more; the disappointed ones disappear quickly and don’t return.

Benchmarking metrics for engagement help you understand how well your site meets user expectations. Do they expect to learn the value of your product up front? Are they more likely to click on an ad if there’s a coupon attached?

Learn what works well, where you need to improve and identify potential churn rate. Monitoring business-relevant metrics is critical for retention and growth strategies.

Engagement metrics also reveal something about the quality of your content, design, and user experience. Do customers respond better to colorful designs or more monotone, informative ones? Do videos lead to longer page views?

While answering these questions is important, to get the most out of monitoring your engagement metrics, you need to benchmark your stats to the competition. It’s not enough to see your daily active users rising or your bounce rate decreasing.

You always want to put your numbers into the perspective of the competitive landscape and determine if you are engaging with your audience or boring them into the hands of competitors.

What keeps your audience engaged?

You can use these metrics to track engagement but don’t forget to keep in mind what’s valuable for your business. A digital publisher is happy with people spending time on their site reading articles, without taking action. But a mobile game provider sees more value in a high number of clicks to external links, rather than people reading content.

The engagement metrics that turn into relevant KPIs need to connect to your business goal. Ask, “Where does the money come from, and what kind of engagement is required from the user to get there?” After you answer that, you can focus in on the data most relevant to your success.

Let’s explore the top engagement KPIs you’ll come across in your digital research that has some significance to almost every online business.

7 metrics everyone should pay attention to

Average Visit Duration – measures the average time visitors spend on your website before leaving. The average session duration begins the moment a visitor arrives at your website and ends when they exit (or remain inactive for a predetermined time span). As long as the visitor interacts with your site, the session continues. Benchmarking against the industry average is the only way for you to evaluate your numbers. Don’t forget that the average visit duration varies significantly per industry.

Average Pages per session – the average number of web pages a user views in a session. This indicates how active users are while visiting during a specific timeframe. With this metric, you can understand whether your content sparks curiosity and is easy to navigate.

Conversion Rate – This is probably the most looked-at metric and is critical for ROI. It shows the percentage of visitors to your website or landing page that complete the desired action. In most cases, this will be a sign-up or a purchase, but it could be any activity you define as conversion. Analyze your conversion funnel and the different steps that lead toward conversion. Do users have to be more engaged at certain times to lead to a sale? Find the golden nuggets to double down on your successes.

Monthly Visits – the average amount of traffic you receive each month. It’s critical to measure your share of traffic against your competitors. Average monthly visits are highly insightful when viewed in correlation with additional engagement metrics (like the next one on this list). For example, high monthly visits coupled with low page views mean that even if you are initially capturing user attention, you don’t keep engaging them for long.

Visits per Unique Visitor – some apps or sites are intended for daily use, others only once a week or less. This metric shows the average number of individual users who visit your site in a specific amount of time to give you an estimation of how often people return to your site – not to be confused with the total number of visitors to your website. Does this go hand-in-hand with the industry standard? Assess the frequency of visits to track your popularity.

New vs. Returning Visitors – you already measured the number of website visitors to identify how many users are arriving at your site. While new users can drive trends and demand, every business needs returning clients. In some sectors, that’s where the main business comes from. Determine the ratio between new and returning visitors and see how you measure up in your industry. Also, evaluate if you are aligned with your current marketing goals: are you focusing on acquisition or retention?

Bounce Rate – this is sometimes called the ‘exit rate’ and is the percentage of visitors to your site who left without interacting. It counts all visitors who leave your website from the same page they entered without taking action, like clicking a CTA or watching a video. It’s critical to monitor your bounce rate and make sure you are within the industry-normal range. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors expected something else. It could also point to a technical error or leaking funnel. If that’s the case, reducing bounce rate is key.

Keep an eye out for app-specific metrics

Mobile apps are a whole different ball game when it comes to user engagement. Because most of the time a user is accessing a mobile application on the go, it’s easy for them to lose interest, closeout, and open up their next favorite app.

If you’re looking to become the next Angry Birds, PokemonGo, or TikTok, keep an eye on these four app-specific engagement metrics.

Daily Active Users (DAU)– the number of users who engage with your app daily. A steadily rising DAU is usually a sign that your app is healthy and you have a sticky product or service (one that users keep coming back to). For many paid apps, this is a key metric because it’s directly linked to revenue. Free apps can learn about the amount of exposure ads are getting and the popularity of your app. Make sure to benchmark against the industry standard. What’s good in one industry may just be average in another.

Monthly Active Users (MAU) – refers to the number of unique users or visitors who interact with your software in a month. This is an important metric for mobile apps, SaaS platforms, online gaming, social media, and any other online business that relies on returning customers. Your main objective is to define what an “active” user is. Is a user who signed in considered “active”, or do they need to interact in some other way? It depends on your app or website type. For a blog, visitors who read an article are active enough, but for a music app, you’d want them to listen to at least one song.

Downloads – tells you how many times your app was downloaded from the Google Play vs. Apple App Store. Remember, this gives you the total number of times your app was downloaded, not a percentage. Benchmark against your direct competitors and similar app types to see how competitive your product is or if you need to step up your marketing efforts.

Install Penetration – shows the percentage of devices in the defined market that have your app installed. For example, if there are 20M active devices in California, and your app is installed on half of them, your install penetration for California would be 50%. Understand how much of your potentially reachable market you have conquered and see how your competitors are doing to understand the market dynamics.

Benchmark with Similarweb and increase engagement

Tracking engagement is a regular activity for most research strategists and digital marketers and should be an integral part of any marketing campaign, product launch, or website optimization. But you’ll need reliable analytics tools to get the insights that genuinely help you evaluate and achieve high-performance levels.

Similarweb’s Research Intelligence lets you measure and track all your relevant engagement metrics in real time so that you can benchmark against industry averages or the best-in-class, all in one place. You can filter according to region, demographics, and more. See industry averages for engagement rates and individual metrics per business category. Then dive deeper into analyzing specific types of engagement to understand where your strengths are and where there’s an opportunity to improve.

Want to see how you can apply it to your business? Try Similarweb today and get the valuable insights you need to ramp up your user engagement.

This blog post was written by Ruth M. Trucks.

FAQ

What is meant by user engagement?
User engagement measures whether users find value in a product or service.

How is engagement measured?

Engagement can be measured by a variety or combination of activities such as downloads, clicks, shares, and more.

by Molly Winik

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Molly has 8+ years of experience in marketing, content creation, and PR. Her work has been featured on Mention, The Times of Israel, and Culture Trip.