Understanding website engagement tracking

This guide gives you an overview of website engagement tracking, its benefits, and essential principles to follow.

You’ll walk away equipped with ideas and a roadmap on how to better track your website’s engagement, so you can improve the user experience (UX) and product experience (PX), and boost your revenue.

What is website engagement tracking?

First, let’s talk about 'website engagement'. One indicator of a website’s success is whether people find its information interesting, helpful, and relevant. If they do, they're more likely to stick around on the site—and eventually take your desired action that leads to conversion.

Website engagement tracking is using metrics and monitoring to see how engaged users are with your site so you can make data-driven decisions moving forward. 

But tracking statistics isn't the end all, be all. Instead, it provides a starting point to ask important questions that lead to continuous UX and PX improvements for your site’s visitors. 

Website engagement tracking helps you answer questions like: 

• What draws users to my website? 

• Where are my users on their customer journey?

• What’s frustrating to my users? 

• What UX and user interface (UI) design elements increase the time visitors spend on my site? 

Engagement data and a dash of curiosity will help you dive deeper into user behavior and provide more benefits for your company and your loyal customers. Let’s take a look at these benefits:

The benefits of website engagement tracking

Tracking website engagement takes time, but if done well, the advantages are more than worth it. 

The website engagement tracking process lets you get to know your users and their needs better than ever, so you can customize and optimize your web design, content, and copy to meet and exceed your company’s engagement or conversion goals. 

Specific benefits include:

• Understand your users’ preferences better: the goal is to make the user experience as frictionless as possible so visitors stay on your site and make purchases. Website engagement tracking helps you determine which UI design elements—like layouts, buttons, menus, and visuals—streamline your visitors’ experience. Need a little inspiration on this front? Read more about UI design trends.

• See what you’re doing well: analyzing metrics helps you understand what’s working—so you can leverage this information to optimize other pages on your site. For example, if page views are exceptionally high for your services page, you could look at Hotjar Feedback responses to see what users love, or send out a survey to ask specific follow-up questions.  

• Discover why users are leaving your site: for example, if your bounce rate is higher than usual, use surveys to ask users why. Then, use heatmaps to see exactly which page elements are getting overlooked and confusing visitors, and recordings to watch for rage clicks and understand individual customers’ reasons for churn.

• Determine if new marketing efforts are working: if you’ve got a new campaign that should be drawing more qualified leads to your home or landing page, you’ll know how well it’s working by comparing your current engagement tracking metrics with historical data. 

Long story short: tracking website engagement serves multiple purposes. It helps your marketing teams track campaign performance, gives your sales department a better understanding of what leads need, and provides insights that let your product teams improve UX.

A 5-step roadmap to effectively track website engagement 

Website engagement tracking involves more than just checking your analytics data. For example, say you look at your metrics, and your site’s average time on page is 42 seconds. That information means next to nothing without context, such as: 

• What’s your goal for average time on page? 

• Is that number higher or lower than last month’s? Why?

• How does that number connect to your campaigns?

• What’s a solid benchmark for your industry? Why could your stats be higher or lower?

• What can you do to continue to improve this metric?

To get the most out of tracking, you have to follow an intentional, multi-step process that lets you gather engagement data, use it to understand your customers, and then improve the customer experience (CX).

Let’s look at the complete website engagement tracking process and how to leverage it to improve outcomes for your company and users: 

1. Put the user first

Getting into a user- or customer-centric mindset lays the foundation for website engagement tracking. Positive outcomes for your company always start with a positive experience for your user. 

2. Choose the right tools

Once you adopt an empathetic, user-centric perspective, it’s time to select the right software for your tech stack. Depending on your company’s specific goals, the combination of engagement tracking tools you choose will differ from the software other businesses use.

You need tools to monitor quantitative data, like key performance indicators (KPIs), and tools to discover the why behind the numbers—the qualitative data. 

To track and monitor key quantitative metrics, start with Google Analytics to collect data and visualize it in easy-to-follow charts and graphs. 

Then, use tools like Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings to dig deeper into why your users behave the way they do. Alex George says, “I’ve actually had the opportunity to work with a number of different tools with our clients at Mountains Wave Marketing. Some of my favorites were Hotjar, FullStory, and Smartlook.”

3. Determine the right metrics to track

Let’s be honest here: there’s no perfect combination of website engagement metrics to track to get the best product insights. That’s because your company, goals, and website are unique. 

However, the top metrics businesses find helpful to achieve their marketing, product, or sales goals include:

• Average time on page: this is the average amount of time users engage with a single page on a site

• Average session duration: a visitor may engage with multiple pages on a site during a single visit. Average session duration measures the length of time in seconds a typical visitor spends on your site from the moment they enter to when they leave.

• Pageviews: a pageview happens when a user visits or re-visits a page on your site. This is different from the ‘page visits’ metric, which measures when a visitor lands on your site from an external source.

• Pages per session: this metric shows the number of pageviews divided by the number of sessions, which reveals the approximate number of pages a single user views in a typical session 

• Bounce rate: if a visitor arrives at a page but doesn’t engage, they’ve bounced. In Google Analytics, this metric shows you the percentage of users who didn't engage with your site within 10 seconds of arriving. 

Remember: not all of these metrics will be relevant to your company or user goals. If you aim to drive organic traffic and qualified leads to your blog, bounce rate might not be the most useful metric to track. Instead, you may want to focus on average time on page, indicating whether visitors enjoy your content.

And if your goal is to increase conversions on a landing page, you’ll keep close tabs on your bounce rate so you can figure out how to stop users from leaving—and get them to buy instead.

4. Figure out the why behind user behavior

Engagement tracking metrics only tell part of the story—they provide insight into what’s happening on a site. What pages do users spend the most time on? What’s the bounce rate on your landing page? 

But for website engagement tracking to be meaningful, you also have to look into the how and why of user behavior. Product experience insights tools like Hotjar Heatmaps, Scroll Heatmaps, and Recordings provide valuable insights, showing you how real users interact with your site. 

Say your average session duration is up, but your average time on page is down (and bounce rate up) on your pricing page. Users are exploring your site, but leaving as soon as they make it to the point of conversion. Now’s the time to look into why. 

Heatmaps let you visualize where visitors are lingering on your site, so you can see what elements they might be missing. Scroll heatmaps let you see how far down the page users get before bouncing, illuminating potential problem areas—and recordings let you watch users as they navigate your site, so you can spot bugs that make them ‘x’ out in frustration.

With these tools, you could discover that users seem confused about your pricing tiers chart. Again, ask yourself why. Maybe the amount of information in the chart is overwhelming, the prices are daunting, the layout could be clearer, or you might need to test out different CTA copy or button colors.

5. Plan your next steps

After tracking your website engagement—and digging deep into the whys of user behavior, it’s time to think critically about what you can do to improve your site experience. 

Say you’ve learned that users are dropping off your site when they see pricing tiers, and you figure out that it’s because of the amount of copy in the chart. Now, all that’s left is to take action. Make revisions to the existing page, and run an A/B test using heatmaps to monitor the results, so you can see which version of your pricing page works better.

Start boosting your website engagement today

The right mindset, tools, and metrics help you level up your website engagement, improve the user experience, and win loyal advocates for your brand. 

Keep your user at the core of your website engagement tracking and decision-making process, and be prepared to test and iterate. Before you know it, you’ll notice positive changes in the metrics you’re tracking—and you’ll have happy users, too.