Measuring Engagement and Usability
Filed under: Analytics on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 by Joy BrazelleTowards the end of last year ‘engagement’ received a lot of attention as an important metric. For some it was ‘the’ metric. I don’t think that one metric should ever be ‘the’ metric, nor should anything be measured in a vacuum.
If there is one ‘key’ metric it would be conversions. But conversions don’t happen unless someone finds your site (either through a search engine [or other site or ad] or by your creating a memorable brand) and then uses and engages with your site.
It is also logical to team engagement with usability because engagement by itself may be misleading. A person may spend a long time on your site, look at many different pages but never find what they are looking for. In that case engagement could equal frustration.
Engagement to me consists of several metrics; the average time on site, the number of pages viewed (with, of course, the caveat that your site is not built in AJAX, using tabbed navigation and does not have lots of video content. If that is the case you’ll want to focus on time on site), as well as specifics based on the business goals of your site. All of this information becomes way more useful once it is teamed with segmenting the visitors.
Metrics like average time on site and page views per visit should be pretty easy to find in any analytic package.
One point to make about average time on site is that it can be a bit misleading. Your site may have a high percentage of one page visits (sometimes called bounce). These are also considered 0 second visits. So depending how the math is done, it can drag the average time n site down. If you have the ability to create a segment or filter on visitors who see at least two pages or a certain number of seconds, that will likely give you a better indication of average time on site.
The next thing to look at, and this is where engagement ties in with usability, is the path that visitors take through your site. Looking at a list of top paths is not really going to give you this information because there are probably countless paths throughout your site. So what you’ll want to do is take the time and follow the visitor experience through your site. This is where Site Overlay reports are a necessity.
You’ll be able to not only see the path that your visitors are taking, but you can follow their paths. In my experience, it is often a real eye opener to see where visitors are having problems with your site.
The first thing that you will find are problematic pages that likely have a high bounce rate. Maybe the page is slow to load, is unappealing or maybe there is a technical issue.
The next thing you will see is missing content. Maybe 80% of visitors who abandon your shopping cart are looking for the shipping costs. Then you will see poor design. Maybe the registration form is confusing because the submit button is at the top.
The great thing about measuring engagement and usability interactively, by following the path of your visitors is that you can immediately spot the problem and get working on fixing the issues and improving the user experience.
