Posted on January 24, 2023 in Live Chat

Every website owner knows that engaging website visitors isn’t just a matter of building a great-looking website. It’s not even a matter of building a beautiful and functional website.

Should your website be attractive and functional? Definitely! But website engagement is a measure of user behavior, not a measure of your website directly.

Understanding how your visitors engage with your website (or don’t) requires an analysis of user behavior. There are a lot of different ways to measure visitor engagement in order to get the full picture. Because the end goal of understanding user engagement is to increase it, the more you know, the better you can implement helpful changes.

Measuring User Behavior With Engagement Metrics

To implement change, you need to understand user behavior. To understand what users are doing, you need to know the key metrics to track. Let’s dig into the topic of what metrics are important to track on your website in 2023, and why.

• Bounce Rate
• Page Views
• Pages Per Session
• Average Time Per Session
• Average Time Per Page
• Sources of Traffic
• New & Returning Visitors
• Click & Event Tracking
• Landing & Exit Pages
• Conversion Rate

Bounce Rate

Bouncing is when a visitor comes to your website but leaves without interacting or navigating to another page on your website. Bounce rate means exactly what it sounds like. It’s the rate of your website visitors who bounce divided by your total number of visitors.

Your bounce rate will always be a percentage between 0 and 100%. A 0% bounce rate would be astonishing (more like impossible) and 100% would show you either have a very sick website, or the people finding your website were looking for something entirely different. The general agreement is that any bounce rate under 40% is good.

If you’re higher than 40%, then the first step is to determine what’s causing visitors to leave without interacting. Some common reasons that affect bounce rate across industries are:

• Poor traffic relevance
• Slow page load speed
• Poor menu structure
• Confusing or unnoticed calls to action

Whether the goal of your website is lead generation or conversions, you should identify and eliminate any of the above issues. But we all know time isn’t unlimited, so if your site has multiple issues it’s important to identify what is causing the most problems. That helps you improve your bounce rate with a minimum of time expenditure.

Page Views

No metric says it all, but page views are an essential engagement metric to track because it underlays all other engagement metrics. Page views are how many pages your visitors view in total. If you have 1 visitor who views 100 pages, your page views are 100. If you have 50 visitors who view 1 page each, you have 50 page views.

While it’s essential that people see your website in order to convert, you could have 1000 page views and 0 conversions. Always keep your goal in mind, whether that’s lead generation or conversions.

A deeper look at page views

If your SEO program is working and your traffic is relevant, then your conversion rates should increase as your page views increase. That’s the ideal scenario. But what about troubleshooting less ideal situations?

Page views could also increase as a result of an ad campaign. If the ad campaign drives highly relevant traffic that increases conversions, that’s wonderful! If your campaign is advertised to the wrong demographics, is unclear, or is misleading, then you may get more page views, but your bounce rate will increase.

Incorrectly executed SEO will have a similar effect. Non-relevant traffic coming to your website is not helpful and may result in zero conversions. People are very willing to leave a website, and visitors don’t like to feel tricked into clicking misleading search results. Check the search terms your website is ranking for and which ones are driving traffic to your site.

High page views coupled with a high bounce rate aren’t ideal, but it should be approached as an opportunity. If you identify what’s causing your visitors to bounce, you stand a good chance of immediately increasing your pages per session.

Pages Per Session

Pages per session is a metric you can really sink your teeth into (metaphorically speaking). If you have a lot of users viewing multiple pages per session, you can use that data to understand your visitors’ journeys through your website.

Analyzing what pages your customers land on and based on that, what they navigate to will give you a very clear idea of their needs. For example, if a customer lands on BirdSeed.io after searching, “live chat plugin” and then navigates to our sign-up page, we can reasonably guess they are looking to increase engagement on their website even if they don’t continue through the sign-up process.

In that case, we could spend some time optimizing our sign-up page to convert those users actively looking to increase engagement through live chat.

Seeing how your website is used will also show you when people misunderstand your navigation or can’t find what they’re looking for. If your users frequently jump from one page to another using your menu, most likely, they aren’t finding what they’re looking for.

On the other hand, someone could be going from page to page because they find so much value in your website. The way to differentiate someone who appreciates your website from someone who jumps from page to page looking for their solution is time per page.

Average Time Per Page

This metric tells you how long, on average, people are viewing each page before they navigate to another page of your website or exit.

If your average user spends a lot of time on each page, that’s unambiguously good. That’s a clear sign you’re providing value through your content and engaging your user.

A high average time per page is also a good indicator that you are attracting highly relevant traffic to your website. As a general rule, people who mistakenly navigate to your website discover it and exit quickly. So high time per page shows your main source of traffic, at least, is attracting visitors with relevant interests or search queries.

But what constitutes a high average time per page is relative to your website and content. If you write in-depth technical guides that are 10,000 words long, a 2-minute average time per page would be low.

On the other hand, if your website exists mainly to sell one product or service, most of your pages geared toward converting users will be much shorter than 10,000 words. A time of 2 minutes on a content-light page intended as the final step to guide users to conversion could be perfect.

You may need to look at page time for individual, important pages as well. Users who land on blog posts before navigating to a conversion page should be expected to spend more time on the blog post than the conversion page.

Average Time Per Session

Average Time Per Session is a good metric to determine if users find your website engaging. Short times indicate low engagement, while a high average time per session indicates users are finding your website engaging.

Time per session is determined by how much time a user spends interacting with your website over the course of an hour or two. It gives you an idea of how long users spend on your website in total, whether it was on 1 page or 100.

Regardless of the duration of time users are spending on individual pages, a high average time per session is a good sign. Users won’t be spending a lot of time navigating all over your site for no reason. Visitors that stay on your website are staying there because they’re receiving some kind of value.

On the other hand, they may not be engaging in the way you want them to. A visitor may read all your blogs and spend an hour doing it. That will show up as an increase in your average time per session. But the visitor could read your blogs without converting.

The reason there are different metrics is that there is no single metric that tells says it all. Conversions are the ultimate test of success (more on that later), but they don’t contain all the information.

Sources of Traffic

How you engage your users may depend on where they come from. All kinds of demographics use hardware stores, and until you asked them why, you wouldn’t know whether they came for a new grill or to replace a worn-out valve on their toilet.

Especially if you offer a variety of products and services, it’s important to know the context your visitors are coming to you from. Let’s look at the different ways traffic can come onto your website:

Direct Traffic

This includes everyone who comes to your website directly. Either by entering your domain name into their URL bar or coming straight to your website by clicking on a bookmark.

Direct Traffic is a part of your audience that is likely loyal to your website or your brand. As a rule, people memorize and bookmark websites they like and use frequently.

A high amount of direct traffic is a good thing. But if a high percentage of your traffic is direct, you most likely have a problem.

A high percentage of direct traffic indicates you are not getting a healthy amount of new users through organic search, which generally speaking is the lifeblood of a website. Without new users, there is no way to replace the customers lost through normal customer churn.

Referral Traffic

This could be from any of your backlinks on other websites. Referral traffic clicks a link to your website from another website or social media.

If traffic is coming from a backlink on another site, the website they are coming from should have provided sufficient context for the visitor. If they did, you would expect those referred visitors to be valuable traffic with a high average time per session.

If they don’t spend much time on your website, it may be that the other website is only referencing a small part of your website. A good example would be a blog post on your website that goes viral. People may then click through only to view the original content and have no more interest in your website.

Paid Search Traffic

Pay-per-click Google Ads are a classic example of Paid Search traffic. This is when a user finds and clicks through your Google PPC Ad in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Google PPC Ads can be a very powerful tool, allowing you to compete for keywords that you are having difficulty ranking for. On the other hand, as soon as you end a campaign, you also end your revenue gains. PPC can gain you revenue boosts, but they require continuous injections of cash.

Be very diligent in analyzing your PPC-generated traffic. If it isn’t resulting in conversions, then something may be wrong with your ads, targeted demographics, or website. Make sure your ads and landing pages are relevant to your target audience.

Organic Search Traffic

Arguably the most necessary form of traffic overall, organic traffic is when users click through to your website from SERPs because they believe your website will answer their needs.

Organic traffic has some inherent positive aspects:

It brings new users to your website. If you are ranking in SERPs, that means new users can find you when through Google search queries.

It’s free. While you most likely have to put time and money into making sure your website’s SEO is meeting Google’s requirements and correctly communicating with the search engine’s algorithm, you are not charged for success. With PPC ads, you pay for every resulting visitor. With organic traffic, you could experience wild success far out of proportion to your spending.

Organic search traffic comes directly from Google and is therefore more reliable than PPC ads which require a constant cash infusion to deliver any results.

Answering Visitor Needs

Wherever your visitors come from, make sure your landing pages are as targeted to that specific audience as possible. This is the best way to increase your visitors’ engagement with your website and encourage them to convert.

New & Returning Visitors

A new or first-time visitor is one that has come to your site for the first time. A return or repeat visitor has already been to your site anywhere from once to a million times before.

It would not be good to have 100% new visitors or 100% repeat visitors. If all your visitors are first-time visitors, that means no one who leaves your site ever comes back. Maybe you did offer them some value, but not enough to make them think you’ll ever provide it again.

Likewise, it’s not healthy to have all returning visitors. On the one hand, it’s excellent: you have a loyal following, though we would have to look at other metrics to see if there are enough of them to matter. On the other hand, it means no new people are discovering your website.

Websites always have some degree of churn: the rate at which users stop returning or using a website. That’s to be expected, and that’s why it’s not enough to focus on returning users. You need to bring in the users that you’ve lost through natural attrition.

You also want some degree of returning visitors. You can’t form a loyal base of visitors or customers unless they continue to interact and engage with your website. There’s a natural balance you want to aim for that replaces lost repeat visitors while still building a user base you can rely on.

Keeping your repeat visitor percentage somewhere between 10% and 30% is usually ideal, allowing you to grow your website while still engaging good numbers of repeat users at a high level.

What can help me reach the right ratio of new to repeat visitors?

Two things: Improving your SEO and increasing website engagement.

Improving a website’s SEO can help every website owner attract new visitors to their website. If your website is mostly optimized already, you can expect that improved SEO will result in more clicks, keywords, rich snippets, and so on. If your site is poorly or incorrectly optimized, you can expect proper SEO to result in larger or even dramatic effects regarding amount of traffic coming to your website.

Increasing website engagement will help retain visitors, whether they are new or repeat visitors and give them a reason to return.

If your ratio of new to repeat visitors is too heavy on the new visitor side, focus on increasing your website’s engagement in order to increase email signups or pull visitors back to your website in other ways.

If you have too high a percentage of return visitors, your engagement is not your immediate challenge. Focus instead on improving your website’s SEO. Optimizing your SEO can bring in more new visitors by increasing your keyword rankings, click-through rate, etc. Increasing organic traffic (you could even run an ad campaign after performing a careful cost-benefit analysis) is the best way to increase your new visitor percentage.

Click & Event Tracking

Engaging your visitors is important no matter what your website is selling, but not all forms of engagement are equally helpful in achieving that goal. Take 100 different websites at random and you could have 100 different actions they encourage their visitors to take to increase conversions.

With BirdSeed, every single click a user takes is recorded to be displayed and analyzed in your dashboard. Tracking these events shows you the ways people want to interact, which plugins are performing well, and which plugins should be optimized or simply cut out.

It can be tempting to provide all the different methods of engaging your customers, especially when BirdSeed provides so many, all ready-to-use and designed to integrate with each other. But it’s possible to overload your visitors with options.

Two results could come from providing too many options. You could confuse your visitor until they actually are annoyed into leaving. Or you could successfully engage them, but in the wrong way.

Here’s an example: if you want your website visitor to convert and buy your product, all your engagement should be directed toward encouraging and providing the information that will hello your visitors to convert. If you also start adding humorous videos to your BirdSeed, your visitors certainly could engage with those videos. But how will those direct the user toward conversion?

Always keep your engagement targeted toward conversion. The way to make sure you are actually leading people to conversion through your engagement methods is by tracking and understanding the way they move through your BirdSeed.

Exit Pages

Every visitor will leave your website, even if they are your most dedicated fans. The question is: what page do they view last before they leave? Visitors leave for any number of reasons, but examining your top exit pages will provide you with some clues.

Your pages that are supposed to engage the user and drive them to conversion should not be among your list of top exit pages. Similarly, your conversion pages themselves should also not be among your top exit pages either. Ideally, it will be your post-conversion or -lead generation pages that will be your top exit pages.

If your “Thank you for ordering/subscribing/downloading” page is your top exit page, you can be assured you’re doing something right. If this is the case, you probably already know because your conversions will be correspondingly high and you’ll have seen the money coming in.

If your top exit pages are your conversion pages, you know you have a problem. At least people are getting to your conversion pages, but that’s not enough if they don’t complete the process. Understanding your top exit pages will help you understand the roadblocks people are experiencing on their way to conversion.

Conversion Rate

Above all else, a successful conversion rate shows you are engaging your users in a way that is a win-win for you and for them. For many websites, a conversion is synonymous with making a sale. But your company may need users to fill out a form, give you a phone call, download content, sign up for a free trial, or something else.

Whatever your conversion may actually be, a higher conversion rate is always better. If you can keep your conversion rate stable while increasing traffic to your website, then more visitors translate directly into more conversions.

BirdSeed was designed to increase conversions for your website. For the many, many websites that struggle with their conversion rate (CVR), adding BirdSeed is a simple way to build visitor engagement in ways targeted to encourage your visitors to convert.

Get Started In Minutes

Turn your website into a 24/7 conversion machine in about 15 minutes!

• Only pay for what you use – Use just 1 plugin or all 12
• Set business hours – Your panel adjusts as your business opens and closes
• Customize Engagement Panel – Adjust the style to perfectly match your website
• Add a welcome message – Invite visitors to connect with you
• Get the mobile app – and done!

The BirdSeed Difference

BirdSeed stands alone in a field flooded with simple live chat, frustrating chatbots, and other piecemeal solutions. BirdSeed replaces all your separate website engagement plugins with the only complete user experience platform.

A successful website prompts users to interact, ask questions, learn more about products or services, leave comments, fill in forms, & navigate via calls-to-action. You might be able to find 12 plugins that would provide some of the functionality that BirdSeed has in itself, but you won’t find any that match its ease of use for you and for your users.

BirdSeed provides multiple strategic advantages over other website conversion plugins, including:

• Omni-Channel Engagement – Connect with your users in the way they want to communicate.
• Easy to Use – All BirdSeed’s plugins are installed in one simple-to-navigate widget.
• Never in The Way – With BirdSeed’s unique design, your plugins never overlap or interfere with each other.
• Cutting Edge Technology – Drive rich & personalized engagement with site visitors, improving conversion rates.
• Saves Time & Money – By combining functionalities BirdSeed can lower costs & saves time with one vendor, one invoice, & one install for 12 plugins.

Businesses need to carefully choose unique plugins to build a highly engaging website – that not only attracts traffic but turns that traffic into revenue.