Business growth is the natural result of customer engagement, so engagement metrics are essential to understanding the trajectory your company is on.
True business growth is the result of a long-term strategy that focuses on acquiring loyal customers who are highly engaged with your business. But what metrics are the best ones to track customer engagement and predict long-term growth?
Long-term engagement metrics focus on user interactions with your brand over time. These predict ongoing behavior and business growth, not just short-term profitability.
If you’re positioning your business growth, here are nine of the best KPIs to track long-term visitor engagement:
1. Repeat visitors
Getting a lot of website traffic is never a bad thing. You need to get people in the door before you can show them your value, but repeat visitors indicate brand loyalty and that the content on your site is good enough that people come back for more. As the number of repeat visitors increases, so does the potential for long-term growth.
2. Number of shares
According to Oberlo, 71% of customers who had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend it to others. This makes sharing content social platforms an essential KPI for engagement. The more likes and shares you get, the stronger the engagement with your customers. Because every social media platform maintains extensive analytics on content posted, it is easy to tell what resonates with customers and indicates the direction you should go for continuing to grow your customer base.
To help increase the number of shares of your content, provide visitors with social share buttons for all of the most popular social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, and Instagram, to name a few. Use the social share buttons that make the most sense for your audience.
3. Positive customer reviews
One of the biggest indicators of company growth is positive reviews. According to Podium, 93% of customers say online reviews have an impact on their buying decision, and 82% of those customers say the content of a review convinced them to make a purchase.
Maintaining a high average customer review rating is critical to building long-term growth. You can increase the number of reviews simply by asking your customers to leave a review and improve the customer experience more by responding to reviews (both positive and negative) on platforms such as Facebook, Google My Business, and Yelp.
4. Average time spent on the website
The average amount of time spent on a website is a basic statistic that indicates how sticky your site is. The more time a customer spends on your site, the more engaged they are with the information on it, and the greater the chance of a conversion. It also means that the visitor might be looking at multiple pages on the site.
5. Pages per visit
The number of pages the user views each time they visit your site increases both the average time spent on the site and provides more opportunities for conversion.
Both the average amount of time spent on the website and the number of pages per visit directly connect to high-quality content. One way to increase the number of pages per visit is to use internal links within every piece of content posted on your site. If the visitor likes the current content, make it easy for him/her to find other useful, relevant content on the site.
6. Low bounce rates
High bounce rates can indicate that your site is not providing enough quality information for visitors or the positioning is not on target. Low bounce rates indicate that the visitor is sticking around for a while and accessing multiple pages on the site. This is also a good indicator that you are providing useful content for your visitors.
7. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
This value tracks how much it costs the company (through sales and marketing efforts) to acquire each customer. Calculating this cost is simply taking the overall cost of sales and marketing efforts and dividing them by the number of customers you have acquired. This cost should be trending down over time for a successful business.
8. Monthly returning revenue (MRR)
This is easier to track if you sell retainer-based services or subscription-based services such as Software as a Service (SaaS). The MRR calculates the monthly revenue from all the recurring items in each customer’s subscription. Multiply this by the number of subscribers and you have your monthly returning revenue rate. Tracking this month-to-month is important for establishing revenue trends. This value can also help predict future performance based on past activities.
9. Subscribers
One of the best indicators of customer engagement is how many subscriptions you have collected for the site. These can represent the customer signing up for a mailing list or newsletter, other premium content, or paid subscription service such as a Software as a Service (SaaS). If these are trending up, you are going in the right direction. If they are trending down, you need to look at your offerings and figure out why they are not meeting your customer’s needs.
Keeping accurate customer information
Accurate customer data is essential to help project long-term growth at a website. Marketing departments depend on this information to develop accurate user profiles to target the best audience for your goods and services. Accurate customer information has three attributes:
- Filters out information that will never reach the appropriate customer
- Helps identify future target audiences for goods and services
- Reduces advertising and marketing waste by eliminating erroneous information due to user errors, click farms, bots, and much more
Accurate user information encourages long-term engagement and growth
Pull new customers into your sales funnel through higher-quality content that creates long-term engagement. The BDEX Identity Graph helps you filter out irrelevant data and identify customers across multiple channels. Ready to learn more about the BDEX Identity Graph? Reach out to the BDEX team to get started today.
