Keep an Eye on User Engagement Metrics in Google Analytics

Most of the business owners’ and analysts’ thoughts revolve around what they find under Sessions and Conversions in Google Analytics. They knew the importance of those metrics and what the movement of those can do to their business. Building strategies to increase the sessions can increase the conversions and thereby revenues, provided the conversion rate is constant. Many strategies can be planned and implemented to reach out to other websites or improve the rankings on Google to increase the sessions. These efforts take time because of two reasons, one, lack of control on how search engines behave and two, the number of decision makers involved in building partnerships with other websites.

While implementing whatever it takes to increase sessions, there are some user engagement metrics, which have been ignored by many, can help you increase the conversions without the struggle to increase the sessions.

Metrics to Help You Increase Conversions

Bounce Rate

As most of you are aware, Bounce Rate provides you the number of people who exit the landing page without visiting any other page on the website.

Why is Bounce Rate Important

The importance of bounce rate can be looked from two perspectives

1. B2B

2. B2C.

The bounce rate bound to be relatively on the higher side for B2B websites. But can we ignore it highlighting the obvious reasons? I don’t think so. Companies need to put their smart brains to work to understand the reasoning behind losing a valuable visitor. Pose some strategically important questions.

• Why am I losing the visitor?
• How can I direct the visitor to the next page?
• How can I take the visitor to the next level of the sales funnel?
• Why are they not clicking on the CTA?
• Is the page relevant to the keyword it is ranking for?
• Are there any issues in terms of indexing?
• Is the page loading fast enough?

B2C websites cannot afford to have a high bounce rate, they are supposed to direct the visitor from one page to another page. Might not be informational but surely from product page to cart page or service page to cart page. Losing one visitor at the first page can directly reflect on the revenue per visitor. Here are the questions you need to ask yourself on why the bounce rate is high

• Does my product/service page provide the required information?
• Does the page have rich UI and UX?
• Am I losing the visitor to a competitor website?
• If yes to the above questions, what are reasons for that?
• Is the page relevant to the keyword it is ranking for?
• Are there any issues in terms of indexing?
• Is the page loading fast enough?

Exit Rate

This metric is often confused with Bounce Rate. Bounce Rate denotes the percentage of visitors who left the landing page without visiting any other page. Exit Rate denotes the percentage of visitors who exited the website on that page. They might land on any page but exited on that particular page.

The only page that deserves to have high exit rate is the “Thank You” page. Any other page that has high exit rate must be analyzed further. Understanding what is hindering the visitor from proceeding further is the key. Here is what can be looked for

• Are there any technical issues, such as Submit/Next button not working?
• Are we asking too many details in the form?
• Are the directions to the next page difficult to find?

New vs Returning

Companies spend huge amount on advertising with the aim of increasing brand awareness and retain brand recollection. The returns for these investments will come back in the form of new visitors to the website. But there is also a chunk of visitors who can be attracted without much financial investments. Those are the returning visitors.

You are in a good situation if your Google Analytics display returning visitors percentage as around 30-35%. But you might have start worrying if it is lower than that, unless you are in an industry where it is normal to have low share of returning visitors. Imagine the kind of business a brain which has your brand imprinted on it can bring you. These visitors hold certain perception about your brand, whether it is a good one or a bad one is a different case. They know you exist. Try to get them back to your website, if the perception is good, you can gain more business out of them. If it is bad, dig deeper to understand how you can reverse that perception. But first, get them back using channels like email and social media.

Don’t restrict yourself to sessions when there are many other user engagement metrics in Google Analytics which can help the revenue grow.

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!