What is Audience Engagement and How to Measure It?

Brands try to attract visitors and customers through online and offline platforms. Marketing helps build brand identity and awareness. Marketing teams promote products and services through various marketing channels to gain audience engagement. Unique advertisements, attractive product showcases, and knowing customers’ likes and dislikes increase audience engagement. Reaching larger numbers of the audience gives more opportunities to get more leads, sales, and growth.

Nowadays, when everyone is a digital fanatic, almost every brand promotes their products digitally across every platform, such as social media, YouTube, blogging sites, and much more available to reach every user. The audience shows their interest in the products of their choice. After attracting a targeted audience, brands try to gain their trust. They regularly update their content, products, services, and offers for new and returning customers, enhancing brand interest. Responding to every customer’s queries and trying to resolve them quickly gain the audience’s trust.

Every brand ensures its presence on every platform. The business website is the heart of a brand. A unique and informative business website attracts users to visit pages, which may lead them to register their details and even buy a product.

Now, when every individual is on social media, brands create pages across every social media platform, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and many more, to reach out to every user. Regularly updating about their products, events, and campaigns keeps users engaged with the brand. They keep track of every user’s response towards their brand and try to reply to them sooner to ensure they feel satisfied and give equal importance to all. Tracking and trying to impose their suggestions in the future makes the user feel delighted and gives brand loyalty. Hence helping a brand grow.

Audience engagement

Audience Engagement

The definition of ‘audience engagement’ is still undefined. You cannot even search Wikipedia for the definition of audience engagement. These are just two words, but they are undefined as yet. The audience in itself is a very vast reach. The same goes for the word engagement. Now imagine what you would say when both words combine, or how would anyone explain? It looks a bit dicey but is still used across marketing. Everyone has a different opinion on this. In our opinion, the definition is-

“Involving the audience in content or events is called audience engagement.”

People with different mindsets will explain and even argue about their thinking about audience engagement. It may sound funny, either. But brands try very hard, in every manner, to get high audience engagement. If they are successful in their approach, then the brand grows.

How to Measure Audience Engagement?

There are various steps to measuring audience engagement—how much the audience is engaged and attracted to content, products, or services.

1. Website Traffic

Engaging content attracts traffic and audience engagement. You can use Google Analytics to monitor website traffic. It helps collect data on users and user behavior. It shows data about user engagement, average time spent on a page, and much more. Thus, use Google Analytics efficiently to monitor a brand’s growth.

Session Duration

Session duration is the total time a user spends on a website in one sitting. It helps determine the user’s engagement level.

A more extended session indicates the user is engaged or spending more time on a website.

If a user does not close the page after reading, the session duration will become longer.

By default, a single session lasts 30 minutes. If a user returns to a page after 30 minutes or the calendar day changes, a new session will start every 30 minutes.

The average number of pages per session for a website with short articles may give better insights.

Due to the lost time, Google Analytics may not give accurate ‘session time’ and ‘active time.’ More tools are available to get more appropriate data. Riveted and Momently are important tools to check along with and provide better information than Google Analytics.

Here, you may get a clear view of the user’s activity by recording mouse clicks, keyboard usage, etc., which lets you know about active users and their other activities on screen while surfing other websites.

Pages Per Session

A brand tries to attract users by its appealing content, which engages users to browse more pages on the website. This increases user engagement, which may turn into lead generation.

When a website has long content, browsing a few pages per session is possible. In that case, we should look for an average number of pages per session and engaged time.

Average Time on Page

Another metric to consider is the average time on the page. The more time spent by a user means they are engaged in a particular post, and the more likely they visit or scroll through other website pages.

Bounce Rate

This is a scary number for a website. The bounce rate is higher when a visitor leaves the website without spending much time and does not surf other pages.

Poor content or less valuable information on the page forces users to switch to another website because they don’t find the information they are searching for. It increases the bounce rate, which is bad for a website.

Quality content can lower the bounce rate, meaning higher audience engagement. If a higher bounce rate occurs, try to understand what is not appealing to users or why users leave your content and update it according to their expectations. It will help to regain better audience engagement.

Returning vs. New Users

Use Google Analytics to check the ratio of returning users vs. new users. Focus on the number of returning users, which creates an environment of loyalty. Returning users means higher audience engagement. But this doesn’t mean avoiding new users and not engaging them. For the growth of a brand, you need new customers as well.

Scroll Position

An increase in the percentage of returning users versus new users shows the audience’s engagement. The longer amount of time spent on a page does not necessarily mean that users got engaged for a longer time, sometimes users visit the page and get busy in some other work while staying on the same page which shows more time duration. For resolving this issue, scroll depth and click locations are recorded.

You can record the depth of page scrolling using Scroll Depth, A Google Analytics plugin for measuring page scrolling. You can also conduct a heat map analysis to determine the click locations. For this purpose, you can install a plugin from Sumo.

Shares for Article Pages

If your articles are shared by users when they read them, you have successfully engaged the audience. It shows they are actively participating on a website and are highly engaged.

You should track the number of shares from the article pages. Shares occur when users visit your website. This tracking can be achieved through a WordPress plugin or similar service.

Conversation Rate

Another way to measure audience engagement from returning users. It shows the real engagement of your content or articles.

To measure the conversation rate, simply count the number of comments returning users make and divide the sum by the total number of posts on a website.

An easy but important metric to check for measuring audience engagement.

2. Use An Event App

More than 50% of users surf the internet on their smartphones. Almost everyone has a smartphone, the most compatible and easy-to-use device for calling and entertainment purposes, including shopping. So, using an event app for a brand or a website is highly recommended to collect user behavior data.

You can integrate Appfigures for the iOS app and Localytics for the Android app to track interactions and learn how the audience wants to interact. They were only interested in networking or Q&A sessions.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing allows you to reach out to a massive number of users. Collect data on users’ emails interested in your content and send them emails using tools like Aweber and Mailchimp. You can add tracking links to these emails to track down the links opened by the user. Analyze how many users engaged with these links. Higher reachability enhances audience engagement.

4. Push Notifications

Use push notifications for your website or on your event app to inform users about your products, upcoming launches and dates, important updates, upcoming events as scheduled, and many more. After successfully notifying the users, count the messages the user opens and the notifications sent. Hence, measuring audience reachability stats.

5. Track Your Hashtags

Everybody is friendly with social media. Whenever they get time or are getting bored, they spend time on social media. Engagement through social media is equally important.

Unique and short hashtags are preferred, as they may be easily remembered by users. Then, monitor those users who use those hashtags in their posts and regularly try to engage with them to attract more customers.

Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite are highly recommended. They alert users of the hashtags used in the content.

If everything goes fine, then you will know-

  1. Is your event or content engaging users or not?
  2. Who are the most engaged users?
  3. You can plan relevant content ideas for your audience.

6. Content Marketing

Create unique content that is highly preferred. After reaching out to more customers using proper hashtags, please share the content with your audience to engage them and increase reachability. Reach can be measured by counting the number of likes, comments, and shares engaged users make.

Unique content ideas may include infographics, blog posts, product images, descriptions, uses, and benefits, event videos, clips of presentations, event highlights, event photographs, and covered key points.

An ultimate guide to using content marketing to improve audience engagement.

7. Track Social Media Engagement

Social media is the best platform to reach maximum users, create events, and use hashtags accordingly. Using proper hashtags for a particular event or post increases users’ attention of their interest. Creating unique hashtags and using them on posts on social media allows your brand to engage more users in a brand.

Don’t focus solely on increasing the number of followers. Instead, try to engage your followers with excellent content. Keep interacting with your audience and building a healthy relationship to bring results.

8. Measure Audience Engagement

If your participants are actively involved in the event or content, then audience engagement will be high. You must encourage them to ask questions and participate in discussions. You must remember to like, share, and comment on your content.

Several strategies exist to actively participate with the audience in your content or ongoing social media event.

9. Attendance vs. Drop-out Rate

Engaged users will stay on your content or Facebook Live event (or some other). If users are not interested in what you deliver, the drop-out rate may increase.

You should give them a reason to read your full content or stay until the end of the event. For example, you may offer a gift or prize to the most engaged users.

10. Assess Lead Generation Outcomes

Focus on the number of sales generated compared to the number of users reached. This is an effective way to measure audience engagement. All brands want users to turn into customers, and more lead generations turn into a more profitable business.

You should try to convert one-time buyers into loyal customers. Industry leaders also consider typical buying cycles and returning customers. To get the most accurate data, follow-up is necessary to bring audience engagement and conversion.

11. QR Codes

QR codes are becoming highly in demand in the digital space. They can help engage more audiences. You can measure how often QR codes are used and the locations where those codes are being scanned. This way, you can analyze the market space and reach more users to generate leads. There is no need to search for links on any page; simply scan the code, and you reach the website’s landing page. QR codes are also being used to track goals and determine the audience engagement level.

12. Polls

Create polls on different platforms to get the count of actively engaged users. Polls must be entertaining and often inquiry-based on whether –

  • Users existing content or not
  • Determine the requirements of users
  • Create expected content

13. Take A Survey

Getting user feedback and knowing about their views on websites or products enhances further improvement after knowing what they want. Try to get a proper survey and get feedback from your audience.

To achieve the best results, create surveys containing simple and straightforward questions related to content. Don’t send complex surveys.

The engaged audience should participate in a survey because only they can fill in the correct information. If a survey reaches out to users who don’t read your content or participate in your event, then the survey outcome would not be correct, making the survey invaluable.

You may complete a survey with different methods-

  1. Survey tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey
  2. Email
  3. QR Code
  4. Event app

You create a report based on user answers. Enhancements in quality increase audience trust and brand loyalty.

“The more genuine the brand, the more loyal customers are and their engagement with them.”

Do you have any ideas about measuring audience engagement? If so, please remember to share them with our readers.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top