Engaging The Consumer

    Engagement is very crucial to the overall strategy of attracting consumers/users to a particular website. For example, bounce rate can be a positive or negative metric, depending on the marketer’s intentions. A bounce rate typically means that a user did not find what they were looking for on a site and decided to leave. This is not always a good thing. However, your website may have a high bounce rate if you are driving traffic to your site for a sweepstakes/contest.

    Many sites will run contests that drive users to a specific site to enter their information for a chance to win. Therefore, the single bounce rate is tends to be higher but the goal was accomplished by the people driving the contest. The website attracted the consumer to the site and that was the result they wanted for the end game. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I do not want high bounce rates when I am distributing my monthly e-newsletter at work. Every lost visitor is a lost opportunity, so you’ll want to figure out why people are leaving and try to add the right content or navigation on your site to keep users around (Parsons). My January e-newsletter report showed one of my five waves only had a bounce rate of 46 consumers (see chart below). We sent to a little more than 5,000 consumers. The open rate was pretty solid (for us) at 20 percent, and the unique visitors was 920.

Page views per visit
    Finding unique ways to attract new customers to a website is important, but just as important, is keeping a user interested enough to browse through the various content (pages) on the website. The longer the customer stays on the page, the increased chance of closing out a purchase or an intended result. Many website owners want to find ways to monetize their site offerings. One of the biggest ways to generate a stream of revenue is to place advertising on the site.

    One of the ways to garner more page views is to have superior content on the site. It’s not enough to have great content. You’ll want to focus your efforts on the most profitable topics, and then make sure your content is indexed correctly by the search engines for these profitable keywords (Wilson). The better the keywords are for the site owner, the higher ranking it will achieve – and thus improve page views.  

    Engagement rates cannot be overstated in the world of web metrics. Businesses are constantly trying to engage consumers to see what motivates them to buy and search for their products and services. In the world of retail, the consumer has a great amount of power in what he or she chooses to buy. This fact should motivate businesses to rethink how they strategically touch their customers via social media and other forms of online media. One way conversations do not endear a business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C) relationship. The average time on a site is perhaps the most common web analytics metric on earth and it plays a role in engagement. But if two people visit your website, one for 1 minute and the other for 100 minutes, the average is useless (Kaushik).

   Consumers want to know exactly what is going on with a company and their products. Social media has played a big role in this movement of wanting more data. It’s up to the business owner to be there to answer questions and maintain a productive and profitable relationship. I think Amazon, Apple and other companies do a very good job of engagement on their social media platforms and websites.