Understanding your users and how they consume your website is crucial to your business even if you’re not a classic e-commerce business. Creating relevant content for your users is important because that’s the only way to get them on your website. Depending on the business, users can be potential customers. Engaged users are more likely to sign up for a newsletter, share your content on social media, submit a contact form or download a whitepaper. All these actions are valuable to your business.
Understanding your users and their pain points is a good starting point to create relevant content. Moreover, it is important to speak the language of your community. But what should be measured in order to evaluate the success of your content if conversion rate and average order values are not available like in classic e-commerce shops?
There are several ways to measure user’s engagement with your website: A good beginning is to have a look at the time a user spends on your website. In this case taking the time when the tab is open is another step to get closer to reality.
But is time alone enough? Most likely not.
This simple concept can be improved by taking other user actions into account: How much of the website does the user scroll, does the user click on another link to get more information or does a user even share an article on social media. Depending on the business and on the website’s goals there are much more user interactions that can be considered.
The next step after deciding for the user interactions is to define a measurement concept. This means which value to give for each interaction (e. g. 1 point for every 30 seconds up to a maximum amount of time). With the help of an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, Mapp, Piwik, etc. and a Tag Management tool (e. g. Google Tag Manager, Tealium, etc.) this setup can be implemented.
Keep in mind: A famous quote says, “without data you’re just another person with an opinion” (W. Edwards Deming). So, don’t rely on your gut feeling and start to measure.