A guest post by Vitaly Kuprenko. 

You need to adapt your website to make users spend more time and engage on it. The simple rule is the longer users stay on your website, the more revenue you will make.

So, the big question is: how to increase user engagement? In this guide I will cover the most popular and powerful tools and ways to get more users on your website.

Why is user engagement important?

Let’s start with the basics: what is user engagement?

User engagement (also customer engagement) is how much time a visitor spends interacting on your website. Engagement can be different interactions, such as downloads, comments, click-throughs, likes, shares and so forth.

However, it’s not easy to capture your visitors’ attention and show your website to users. Due to high competitiveness, users can easily leave to visit elsewhere. This is why you should focus on website visitor engagement. According to a survey by McKinsey & Company, C-level executives prioritise building engagement into websites.

There are several reasons to pay attention to user engagement:

• Engaged customers feel like a part of your brand community. This makes them more loyal to your brand. So when it comes to selecting services or products, they are more likely to opt for the company they’re more familiar with.
• Engagement is directly proportional to profitability. R ‘Ray’ Wang claims companies with increased engagement metrics have increased revenue as well. Orders increased by 80%, cross-selling by 22%, and up-sell revenue by 38%.
• Engagement increases awareness. Google considers your users’ behaviour when ranking websites. The longer users stay on your website, the higher it is ranked on Google. Moreover, when users like your content, they may share it on social media. Word-of-mouth marketing is quite effective.

Ways to increase user engagement

Let’s move on with the most useful tricks that help you increase user engagement.

Reduced page load time

People get bored of slow websites, especially if the loading time takes more than 3 seconds. There are various services to help find out the speed of your website. If you need to reduce page loading time, try compressing pictures, getting rid of useless plugins or changing your host.

Consider UI/UX Design

ResearchGate found that the attractive UI/UX design contributes to 94% of the overall first impression.

It’s better to cooperate with qualified and experienced UI/UX designers to ensure you follow trends. Also, UI/UX designers can offer user-friendly solutions.

• Responsive design. Evert website needs to be responsive to improve customer engagement. Most web visitors will use mobile devices (smartphones or tablets) to view websites and make orders. A bad mobile experience makes them leave. Therefore your website needs to look good on a desktop, web browsers, smartphones, and tablets.

• Readable fonts. The visual representation of your website is important. Customers need to find it easy to read posts, visit other pages and interact with your website. Avoid being bamboozled by fancy fonts which nobody can read in a hurry.
• Test your website. A/B testing helps you change the position of some website elements and see how this impacts engagement and conversion.

Use Content Marketing

To reach more users, you should offer interesting and useful content.

• Use SEO techniques. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) helps users find your website. However, only use relevant keywords and practice white-hat SEO.
• Consider your customer. Define your ideal buyer persona and write purely for them. Your content should solve their problems.
• Make useful content. Good content attracts users. Catch your customers’ interest through the headlines and engaging content with colourful pictures. Complex sentences and fancy words are unnecessary when creating useful and easy-to-read content. You need to focus on quality over quantity.

Share content on social media

Make it easy to share your content on Social Media like Twitter or Facebook, as this exposes your content to more people. Additionally, allow your users to register for commenting via their social media handles.

How to measure customer engagement on your website

There are no simple rules on how to measure user engagement. This will always depend on your website type. To give you a hint, I’ve listed some ideas:

• Engaged time and pages per visit for blogs or news portals.
• Conversion rate and core actions for sites geared towards selling goods and services.
• Clicks on ‘Add to cart’ and the number of item views on your e-commerce website.

There are some basic metrics like engaged time and bounce rate. Use analytics tools like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics to track them.

• Engaged time. This is a metric which tracks the amount of time a user interacts on your website. It’s activated when a customer has an active browser tab and clicks on links or just moves their mouse.
• Bounce rate shows how soon visitors left a page within a selected time, or if they only viewed one page (you can set your own conditions).

• Visitors can be divided into returning and new visitors. Returning visitors includes people who have visited once and then returned within a specific timeframe. The new visitors’ indicator is a web metric which primarily shows the level of website user engagement.

As you can see, there are various ways to increase user engagement on your website. The core things are attractive design and useful content. And remember to always track your customer engagement through using Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics.

About the author

Vitaly Kuprenko is a writer for Cleveroad. It’s a web and mobile app development company with headquarters in Ukraine. He enjoys writing about technology and digital marketing.

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