Keep Me Engaged!

What’s a good visit to a website? 

Knowing how users spend time on your site is of the utmost importance for marketers. This is, broadly speaking, what is known as “engagement.” As Avinash Kaushik notes, “we should all try to create website experiences that draw favorable attention or interest” (Kaushik 2010). However, there is an open question how, exactly, one can or should measure such a thing. Ultimately, it becomes a question of attempting to measure how individuals interact with your site. Are they clicking links? Are they downloading materials? Are they commenting? 

To put it in real terms, consider the case of Visit Alexandria, which is Alexandria, Virginia’s tourism bureau. The bureau’s website, visitalexandriava.com receives nearly 2 million visits a year which is, certainly, nothing to sneeze at. However, there’s an open question of what constitutes an “engaged” visitor. Therefore, the bureau’s marketers had to make up a definition for positive engagement, which they defined as a user who does one or more of the following: 

“1. Spends four or more minutes on the site in a given session 2. Visits four or more pages in a given session 3. Requests an Official Alexandria Visitor Guide (digital or printed) 4. Subscribes to the Alexandria Insider e-Newsletter” (Simpleview 2017). 

The team at this site wanted to increase the number of “good” visits, so they did something very simple, yet ingenious: they placed call-to-action links in more prominent spaces on their page, making it easier for individuals to subscribe to newsletters or request visitor guides. The website found that the number of “engaged” visitors increased by 51 percent. 

So why is this so important? For the tourism bureau, “if website visitors increase engagement with the content, they also increase the chance they will visit in-person. If a strong connection (as opposed to just passing awareness) with the potential visitor is established, they are more likely to respond to the opportunity to visit” (Simpleview 2017). Interested readers move units or, in this case, spend more money on tourism. 

Let’s also talk about snopes.com. With all of the talk of “fake news” in the air, the invaluable service provided by the good folks at Snopes is more important than ever. However, with limited resources, Snopes requires an engaged audience to maximize revenue. The site found that they received a good deal of traffic from social media sites such as Facebook, but once readers got there, they were not necessarily engaged. They simply read one page and then left. 

Their solution? A box with “dynamically populated recommend content” at the bottom of each individual page on the site that would provide the user with additional stories they might be interested in. The website’s co-owner, Vinny Green, stated that this box had an “added bonus of on-site recommendations [which] allowed us to maximize strategic web page real estate that was difficult to optimize using rudimentary database queries” (Deshdeep 2017). In layman’s terms, this box wasn’t obtrusive and yet gave users a reason to keep reading. The site found that their number of engaged users almost doubled, with Green stating that “On-site recommendations dramatically increased user engagement in a key piece of real estate on the site, handedly beating our in-house related articles query”(Deshdeep 2017). 

Ultimately, the goal of any site owner is to keep users clicking on things. By providing our users with more “stuff” to mess around with, we create better customers with a stronger attachment to our brands. These customers are more loyal and hey, they might just buy things from us, too. However, without a strong standard to measure this engagement, we will never know how active users are on our sites, and we’ll miss out on these opportunities.