So you started your business, built the website, and began producing the kind of quality content that attracts the right audience. Now what? As a business owner, it is important to know how users are engaging with your site, and having a good understanding of user engagement metrics is crucial. Below we have highlighted the 3 best Google Analytics Metrics to measure engagement.
1. Pages-Per-Session
Pages-per-session is the measurement of how many pages a user visits within one session on your site. This measurement helps point to how engaged a user is with your site specifically. With every page load, your analytics platform will record a tally, so nothing is lost. From a business perspective, the higher the pages-per-session metric, the better. This is because a high pages-per-session count shows that your website visitors looked around and visited more than one page – truly engaging with your website.
How to track pages-per-session
In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. You’ll see a column for Pages/Session.
To calculate the number of pages-per-session, take the sum of the number of pages each user visited and divide it by the total number of sessions.
2. Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is defined as the percentage of single-page visits, or visitors that leave a webpage without taking an action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase. Bounce rate is useful as a general measure of user engagement, content quality, and it can be helpful in identifying when problems exist on your website. A high bounce rate is an indicator that visitors are not finding what they are looking for and thus quickly leaving your site after initial entry.
How to Track Bounce Rate
In Google Analytics, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. You will see a column for Bounce Rate.
3. Time on page
Time on page or session duration is the average amount of time that a user spends on a particular page (or your site as a whole). It can be a good indication of the level of interest or involvement the visitor has with your website.
There are two ways to look at time spent:
Time spent on page
Average session duration or the average time spent on site
How to Track Time Spent on Page
In Google Analytics, go to the ‘Acquisition’ tab where you will find both time on page and average session duration metrics.
Google Analytics tracks page activities using timestamps every time a page loads or when an activity triggers more events. This is measured by looking at the difference between when the first event occurred compared to the next.
For example: if a page was viewed at 10:30 am and the next one was viewed at 10:34 am, the time spent on page for the first page is 4 minutes.
While there is no one formula for all websites, we recommend you decide which metrics matter most to your website and the type of content you are producing and develop a plan to track them accordingly.
