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Are You up to Speed on Your Online Engagement?

Tristan Anwyn

March 30, 2015

How engaged are your customers with your small business brand?

By understanding how engaged your customers are, you can streamline your online offerings to encourage further engagement from interested customers. That way, you'll be growing brand loyalty and focusing your energy on getting the customer attention and action that you want.

So just why do you need to measure online engagement and what are some tips for doing just that?

Why Measuring Engagement Matters

Online engagement means how visitors to your website or social media profiles are interacting with your small business.

You're not just looking at the number of visits. You're looking at what happens during those visits.

Are your visitors:

• Clicking links?
• Buying products?
• Subscribing for updates?
• Exploring your site in depth?
• Sharing your content on social media?

By finding ways to measure how your customers interact with your small business, you can get a much clearer picture of what is working well than if you rely on visitor counts alone.

Measuring online engagement matters, letting you know how well your business is doing when it comes to keeping customers interested.

Know What Engagement Means to You

One of the issues with measuring online engagement is that it means different things to different people.

As the article "Measuring Online Engagement & Return on Investment" points out, it's important to set expectations so that you have a clear idea of what engagement means for your business.

To figure this out, think about the objectives of each type of online activity.

For example, if you make a Facebook post, what is the aim? It is to get comments, likes or shares? Is it to get your customers to click a certain link?

Once you know what the objective is for a piece of online content, it's much easier to visualize what engagement would look like.

Understanding what engagement looks like for your small business is key to measuring it successfully.

This is where you need to sort the wheat from the chaff, making a distinction between customers who don't actively engage with your brand in the ways you have defined as important, and those who do.

The ones who do are the customers whose activity you need to measure in order to evaluate how engaged they are with your business.

Decide How You're Going to Measure Engagement

There isn't one single metric that can be used to measure online engagement. Instead, you'll need to use different metrics to build up a useful picture.

To get started with this, start by knowing what you need to measure in order to track engagement.

If you need to know how a social media campaign is performing, for example, then you might want to track how many likes or shares a post is getting, and whether the numbers are particularly high at a specific time of day. 

Maybe you want to measure how far towards a purchase customers are getting when they visit your website.

In that case, you will want to track their activity on your site to see who is browsing your products, how long they're lingering, whether they are emailing product details to themselves, and of course whether they are ultimately buying from you.

By deciding which metrics will be the most useful to you in measuring engagement, you can make sure you gather the information that matters, and focus on that.

Measuring online engagement can be challenging - there's not one single metric that will tell you how engaged your visitors are.

However, by having a clear idea in your mind of what engagement means to you, you can plan how to measure it and how to use that information to assess whether your business is forming meaningful connections with customers.

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