UX How-To Guides

How to measure website engagement

There are no perfect engagement metrics, choose the ones that your organization cares about and can act on.

Unfortunately, there is no single metric  for measuring user engagement for an online education program.  In fact, there’s not a single definition of engagement for any website or digital product or platform.  

Instead, you need to decide what is most important to your organization and then choose a few metrics that help you understand how well your website or product is performing in that area. 

You also need to consider the decisions you need to make as an organization.  What are the signs that an educational program is successful?  How will you know if it’s not?  What data do you need to make decisions about how to best engage with your members to meet your goals as an organization?  There’s no reason to track a bunch of metrics that don’t help you make a decision or that you can’t control or act on.  

For example, in my business, I track the emails that I send to prospective clients.   Since I’m just starting to build a client list, what’s most important to me is just that I’m consistently sending out emails.  So that’s what I track: the number of emails I send each week. I can’t control whether I receive responses or not, so I’m not focused on response rates. As long as I hit my weekly goal of emails sent, I can celebrate that as a success. 

Vanity metrics

Metrics that aren’t actionable and that don’t help you improve your product or business, are called vanity metrics.  Vanity metrics can be exhilarating (when a post gets many reactions and comments) or discouraging (when your response rates are abysmal), but rarely paint a full picture or point you toward the right improvements to make.

Instead, you just need to measure what you care about and what you can control or do something about.  I say “measure” rather than “track” because I don’t mean that you stop tracking the multitude of data points about what your users are doing on your website or in your product.  Let your analytics tool continue to do its job.  What I mean is that you’re going to choose which pieces of data you’ll use to gauge your performance or success.  

Metrics to pay attention to depending on what’s important to your organization.

For example, let’s say that your organization’s mission is to empower new ocean activists. The primary way you accomplish this is by providing an educational program to schools.  The program is delivered in a digital platform with multiple modules and tasks to complete before completing the program and receiving a certificate.  

Engagement metrics to track for an educational training, course, or program

  • Completion rates – for the entire program and individual modules to identify drop off rates.
  • New vs returning users
  • Active time / time on task – how long it takes to complete a module.
  • Task efficiency – how long it takes to complete a critical required task (a quiz or uploading an assignment) in the product.
  • Ease-of-use ratings – survey your product’s users.  
  • Satisfaction scores – if you want people to complete more courses or training, it might be useful to survey them to get a sense of their attitudes toward the course material and/or format.

Tools and methods for measuring engagement metrics

  • Dig into your web or product analytics data – you probably have all the data you need already, sitting in your analytics tool.  If not, now’s the time to set one up.
    • Popular tools: Google Analytics, Fathom, HotJar (heatmaps), FullStory, Mixpanel. 
  • Conduct quantitative usability testing – that  just means usability testing with a statistically significant sample size (NN/g recommends a minimum of 40 participants).
    • Use this method to establish a baseline and to conduct A/B testing for low traffic sites. 
    • This method is also helpful in collecting the data that you’re most interested in, which might be difficult to capture with your analytics tool.
    • Popular tools: UserZoom, Optimal Workshop, or any survey tool with your own panel of participants.

Simple ways to track and share metrics within your organization

The method you choose to document your metrics doesn’t matter – it just needs to be easy for you to keep up with.  It also needs to be in a format that makes it clear at a glance whether you’re tracking in a positive direction toward your goals or not. 

Here are a few simple ways I suggest for sharing metrics:

  • Screenshot the metrics in your analytics dashboard and share it with your organization in Slack, Notion, Confluence, or wherever you collaborate.
  • Create a slide deck and update the metrics each month, share the deck or just an image of the latest slide wherever your org collaborates.
  • Create a simple table in a Google Doc, Notion, or Confluence, and add metrics each month. 
  • Track your metrics in a spreadsheet and create pivot tables to visualize trends and changes over time.

References