How to use engagement metrics to improve your website
How do you know if your high-demand keywords are useful?
Maybe you’re already driving traffic to your site through some of these keywords but you aren’t getting anywhere with them.
That’s where engagement metrics come in. Looking at the various engagement metrics in Google Analytics should be a part of your process when reviewing paid or organic campaigns.
In this article, you’ll learn about what each metric means, and how to use the data effectively.
What are the metrics to look at?
Conversions and conversion rate are obvious metrics to look at when measuring the performance of a page but engagement metrics, including bounce rate and session duration, provide important insights into how well your chosen keywords resonate with your audience.
High engagement indicates users find your content relevant and valuable, while low engagement suggests a mismatch between content and keyword intent.
Google collects engagement data and uses it as a ranking factor. This means pages with high engagement show up higher on Google.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who enter your website and leave without interacting further.
A high bounce rate (usually 65%+) often signals poor relevance—users aren't finding what they expected based on their search query.
A low bounce rate indicates the content is meeting user expectations. A good bounce rate tends to be between 40-50% but there are a few factors to consider.
A bounce rate below 20% however might indicate a problem with tracking.
If your page is at the bottom of the funnel where customers make a purchase, find a phone number, or simply answer their question, the bounce rate may be high so it is important to factor that in.
Session duration
Session duration measures how long users spend on your site. Longer sessions generally reflect strong content engagement, suggesting that the information provided is useful and well-matched to the searcher's intent.
Engagement rate
Google introduced engagement rate because simply measuring bounce rate doesn’t tell the whole story.
Engagement rate takes into account the bounce rate and session duration, together.
Good engagement (low bounce rate, longer sessions) typically means your content closely aligns with user needs, indicating successful keyword selection and content strategy.
Bad engagement (high bounce rate, shorter sessions) suggests the opposite, potentially requiring adjustments in content, targeting, or keyword choice.
How do I improve engagement?
Pages should always have a purpose. A page that isn’t designed to serve your audience in some way will usually fall flat.
Make sure you plan what your page is for. Think about:
The purpose (Informational, Commercial, Transactional, Navigational)
The audience the page serves
Is it for organic or paid search
Is it for a campaign (email etc)
Then, when building your page:
Write for your target audience
Aim for high quality no matter what the length
Perfect your messaging
With a strategic approach to your planning, your pages will always have a purpose and follow a blueprint that should attract the audience they were designed to. This means they will have better engagement.
Once your page is live use the engagement metrics to measure the quality of your content. If anything is underperforming, make adjustments.
If session time is low consider reviewing your copy and keywords. Analyse competitor articles/pages that serve the same queries. Are you talking about the same thing? Do you answer the questions correctly?
High bounce rate? Check against search intent and focus on the ‘above the fold’ part of the page. You need to make sure your headline is attention-grabbing. Your images make sense to your target audience and any calls to action are clear and working.
If you are focused on conversions, whether that’s sales or leads, you need to focus on the sales message and the call to action. Make sure the keywords your page is picking up are commercial/transactional so that they attract the users that are ready to take action.
What can I do with high engagement?
What if you have a page with particularly good engagement? You’re driving decent traffic there and you are seeing a great response from the audience that finds your content.
Revisit the page and look at the following:
Add a call to action - If users are spending a lot of time on your article but it wasn’t originally designed to convert, look at ways you can capture data. Engaged users are more likely to take up an offer for a download or to subscribe to your mailing list. Test adding a popup that is triggered on dwell time or consider turning the content into a downloadable white paper with a download CTA on the page.
Look at internal linking opportunities. If your page is generating traffic but you don’t see it as a natural opportunity to capture data, look at ways you can move that traffic to other parts of your website. This could occur naturally in the copy of your page or you could add related topics/articles/products to increase stickiness.
Keep it updated. Treat your content like a garden. It might look nice now, but if you leave it unattended for too long it will suffer. You need to maintain your content, add to it, prune it, keep it engaging and evergreen.
Need some help?
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