User engagement on a website is a critical factor in ensuring that your website ranks well on search engine platforms. When my co-founders and I started Ascend Finance, I knew that user engagement could potentially be the most important metric to measure.
Most websites have competitors that offer a similar product or service. Even if you successfully attract your desired number of visitors, it won’t give the desired result if they don’t engage with your platform and perform the desired action.
The impact of having an effective marketing strategy that brings engaging users in the conversion process is a highly important step that should not be overlooked. More often than not, you need to engage your audience before convincing them to use your product. A lack of incentive for them to engage with your platform will negatively affect your bounce rate.
As such, if it’s so important to have a top-notch user engagement rate, how can you ensure that your site is not lagging in that aspect? In this article, we’ll discuss how to work on driving user engagement to your site.
Struggling with low user engagement? Here is what to do.
Website clicks are quite cool, however, it’ll amount to nothing if website visitors are leaving as quickly as they entered.
If you have low user engagement, then you should carry out a website analysis to understand the exact problem.
There are three essential testing metrics that you should use a test:
· Bounce rate: The rate at which visitors leave your website after visiting just a page.
· Average pages per visit: The sum of pages individual visitors visit per session. It answers the question: are your website visitors interested in the content of your other webpages?
· Average time on the website: The average time your website visitors spend on your website. Most times, when the average time is low, it shows that they’re dissatisfied or uninterested with the web content. An ideal average time is one that is enough for users to fulfill the purpose of the website. I.e., read your blog post, watch a video, subscribe to a newsletter, etc.
3 Tips to drive user engagement to your website
1. Reduce Page Load Time
A host of websites on the internet are slow loading websites. You yourself have most likely encountered sites like that. You see a website that has what you are looking for, tap on the link, and it takes an eternity to load. You have probably exited pages such as these because of the slow load time.
Research by Soasta shows that pages that load by one second slower records a 56% increase in bounce rate. Now imagine those that are seconds slower.
Carry out a page test to know the load time of your website. If your website doesn’t load within two seconds, then you should get rid of unnecessary elements on it to speed up the load time.
You can also get plugins that’ll delay pictures from the loading till users get to the page area.
2. Improve the internal linking structure of your website
Apart from making efforts to boost your site’s SEO ranking, having good internal linking makes the process of navigating your site seamless. This will help you get more page visits and a lower bounce rate. The two are equally important for getting better user engagement. Employ useful anchor texts to link the web page with other webpages on the website.
Here are some basics on internal linking:
· The anchor text for each link should be descriptive
· They must be hyper-relevant and specific
· Links should direct users to a completely new webpage, not a page with similar content to the initial web page.
However, don’t overuse internal links as that could dissatisfy both search engines and page viewers.
3. Use A/B testing to choose the best tactic
The ultimate goal of this article is to show you the right strategy to drive your website’s engagement. That said, the most effective strategy for your site depends on your target audience. There is no universally effective strategy, but you can use A/B testing to compare strategies and see the one which yields the highest engagement for you.
A/B testing is a useful tool for a growth-driven organization. It is important if the online property is a major or minor part of your customers’ touchpoint, regardless of your niche.
By definition, A/B testing is an experiment that compares multiple versions of a marketing strategy, by controlling for a few variables at a time. In this case, the marketing strategy will be to increase user engagement.
To use A/B testing to test user engagement, you should try out two strategies on your website and compare which strategy brings more results. Employ statistical analysis to determine the winner.
In Summary
Getting page visits is not enough metric to watch out for. You need people to engage with your website, or else they won’t make any significant decisions.
In this article are analyses that you can take to study why you have a low engagement rate as well as some essential tips for increasing and driving user engagement to your website.
