Web analytics and blogs: How do you measure visitor engagement?
My Google Analytics stats show that 70% of visitors spend less than 10 seconds on my site and 66% of visitors visit one page only. When I first looked at these metrics I was really concerned that I was doing a terrible job at engaging my visitors. I came up with a list of actions such as linking to related posts, improving the categories, encouraging comments etc . I’m absolutely certain that there’s a lot of room for improvement and that action plan is still valid. However, I do have a much better insight into the metrics after reading Avinash Kaushik’s fantastic book on web analytics.
Time On Site
When someone first visits a website, a session is started and the time is logged. From that point, every time a request is made to the web server, there is a timestamp. The time spent on a page is calculated as the difference between the timestamp when the visitor goes to the page and the timestamp when they visit another page. All well and good except that there is no way of knowing how long the person spends on the last page they visit as there is no time stamp to indicate the end of that event and the beginning of the next. The tools calculate the time spent as zero.
This makes the metric particularly misleading when the website is a blog. Although I might like people to go deeper, read other posts and have a look around, it’s perfectly understandable that someone visits and just reads the latest post. The problem with the stats is that whether they spend 10 minutes reading the post or 5 seconds deciding it’s not interesting, the time on site is still zero which then distorts the overall “average time on site†metric.
Page Views
The number of pages viewed is usually considered to be important when trying to measure the level of engagement. The more pages someone looks at, the more interested they are in the website as a whole. It’s not quite so straightforward with blogs. Subscribers and repeat visitors are a good measure of engagement and yet these visitors will typically come just to read the latest post, or the last few posts which will probably be on one page. And then of course they might not visit the site at all and read the posts somewhere else like a reader.
So what should you measure?
Well I guess the metrics are still useful as long as you understand the inherent flaws. And subscriber stats and number of comments are useful indicators of engagement. Anyone want to offer some feedback on what metrics they find useful and the best way to measure engagement on blogs in particular?
Posted in Blogging, Web Analytics
October 19th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Christine
Thanks for that explanation! My figures are virtually the same as yours (and analytics indicates that search engine traffic spends much less time on the site and looks at fewer pages). I’d never considered that it’s because of the “action” required to register that the visitor is still there.
Do you think that bounce rate is similar? If only one page is viewed, and there are no further actions, would that constitute a “bounce”?
I think that “reach” as displayed in feedburner is good for measuring engagement.
They explain it as “At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach†measurement provides this additional insight”.
Commenting is good to measure engagement, but I find that a vast number of subscribers will predominantly lurk, unless something you’ve written really touches a nerve or particularly resonates. You get to know who’s likely to comment on what after a while! So unless you’ve got a really defined niche, you’re not always going to “hit the mark”.
October 19th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Thanks for that Christine - the “O” time metric not equating to “O” is not something I was aware of. Makes sense now.
I do worry about my bounce rate. According to Analytics it is often over 50%. In real time life, I subscribe strongly to employment concepts around retainment verses recruitment (naturally, I do recruit for my blog too but retainment is a measure of success for me). An analysis or explanation of “bounce” would be interesting.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Thanks for the comments Meg and Megan.
Bounce rate has the same problems as “time on siteâ€. It doesn’t really mean much in the context of blogs when you expect a large number of visitors to view one page only.
I just found on the Google analytics blog that they recently started to exclude one page visits when calculating average time on site but too many people complained so they’ve switched back again.
It just goes to show how difficult it can be when trying to make sense of stats.
Thanks for the thoughts on how to measure engagement (buzz word for today hehe) – it’s a hard one and I guess to a degree it’s different for each website depending on the goals and how well you can measure tangible outcomes.