BBP 132: Understanding Engagement Rates with Sherry Smothermon Short

Shownotes:

In this  podcast episode, Sherry Smothermon Short delves into the intricacies of engagement rates and how they can significantly impact your blogging success. She demystifies the concept of engagement, offering practical strategies for analyzing your blog metrics and enhancing user interaction. Listeners will gain valuable insights into comparing posts with varying engagement levels, allowing for a deeper understanding of what captivates an audience. This episode is a must-listen for bloggers eager to connect more effectively with their readers and elevate their content strategy

What is Engagement Rate?

Engagement rate is a metric that determines how effectively visitors interact with your blog. For a session to be considered engaged, one of the following must occur:

• The visitor stays on your site for 10 seconds or longer.
• The visitor views two or more pages.
• There is a conversion event (though this is not always applicable to every blog).

An important thing to note is that bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate. For instance, if you have 100 sessions, and 75 sessions are engaged, your bounce rate will be 25%.

Calculating Your Engagement Rate

To find your blog’s engagement rate, go to your analytics reports and customize your metrics to include engagement rate.

You can do this by selecting the engagement rate metric and placing it at the top of your report. Remember, a high engagement rate with very few views may not provide valuable insights.

Analyzing Engagement

Once you have your engagement rate data, look for blog posts with both high and low engagement rates. Open both posts in separate tabs and compare them. Consider:

• Do both posts have compelling introductions?
• Are there internal links high up in the content?
• What differences can you identify that may influence reader behavior?

This comparison will help you identify elements of success and areas that need improvement.

Trial and Error

Remember, what works for one blog may not work for yours. It’s essential to experiment with different strategies.

If a particular approach yields positive results, fantastic! If not, revert and try something else. Engagement enhancement is an ongoing process of trial and error.

Related Content

• How to Install Google Analytics (3 ways)
• BBP 026: Using Google Analytics to Make Better Decisions as a Blogger
• BBP 068 How To Use Data From Google Analytics To Improve Your Affiliate Marketing

Transcript

Liz Stapleton [00:00:07]:

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit podcast. I’m your host, Liz Stapleton. And today we’re diving into the wonderful world of engagement rates. Trust me, by the end of this episode, you’ll be an engagement rate pro ready to tackle your blog metrics with confidence. Now let’s let Sherry Smothermon Short take over and let you learn.

Sherry Smothermon Short [00:00:24]:

Next, we need to talk about engagement rate, and let me explain what engagement rate is before we jump in to find an engagement rate, on our reports. For a session to be considered engaged, one of 3 things needs to happen. Either the person needs to stay on your site 10 seconds or longer, or they need to visit 2 or more pages, or there needs to be some sort of conversion event. Now a lot of us don’t sell anything, so there wouldn’t be any kind of monetary conversion. And we may not have other types of conversions set up. So we’re just gonna focus on the first two, on staying on your site for 10 seconds or longer and on the visiting 2 or more pages. Now another thing that you need to know about engagement rate is that bounce rate now is the inverse of engagement rate. Let’s say I have a 100 sessions, and 75 of them are considered engaged because somebody stayed on the blog 10 seconds or longer or visited 2 or more page views.

Sherry Smothermon Short [00:01:26]:

If 75 is my engagement rate, the percentage of the sessions that were engaged, my bounce rate is going to be 25%. It’s all the unengaged sessions, I guess, you could say. Again, bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate. Let’s find our engagement rate. We’re gonna stay on this page, the our pages and screens, but we’re gonna make a couple of changes. We’re gonna get rid of that search, and then we’re gonna get rid of our secondary dimension. What we need to do is to add our engagement rate. The way that we’re gonna do that is go here under customize report.

Sherry Smothermon Short [00:02:03]:

Then we are going to go to metrics. Engagement rate is a metric, so we’re gonna add the metric. And the way we do that is by clicking down here in the add metric box, and we can just start typing engagement rate, and then you’ll see it pop up. And we can select it, and then we’re gonna move this to the top. So I’m just gonna grab those 6 dots and drag it up here and drop it. Actually, we’re gonna make that engagement rate first. Then we’re gonna click apply, and then we wanna save this. And I’m going to save this as a new report.

Sherry Smothermon Short [00:02:38]:

I’m gonna click save, and then we can go back. Now that we’ve got engagement rate on here, we don’t want to sort by engagement rate, and let me tell you why. This, blog post here has gotten 2 visits, and it’s considered, a 100% engaged. That is meaningless when you’d only had 2 views to the page. So we’re gonna hover over here. If you look just to the left of views, you see that little gray down arrow? We’re gonna click on that, and that’s gonna sort it in in descending order by our page views. I’m gonna give myself 50 rows here, and I’m looking for 2 things. I’m looking for a blog post with a low engagement rate and a blog post with a high engagement rate.

Sherry Smothermon Short [00:03:28]:

I’m gonna just start scrolling down through here. I’m gonna skip my home page, and I’m gonna skip any category and tag pages. So let’s just keep scrolling down. Let’s choose this handmade hiking sticks for our high engagement rate post. And then let’s see. And we’re gonna use this kid’s fingerprint activity for our low engagement post. Now what I want you to do once you identify those things is open each of those in, a a separate tab. So you’ll have both of them open so you can look at both of them.

Sherry Smothermon Short [00:04:03]:

So what we’re looking for when we have those 2 posts open is what are the differences between the 2? What do we have in that high engagement post, the the hiking stick post, that makes people stick around or visit 2 or more pages that we don’t have in the fingerprint activity? Or what do we have in the fingerprint activity that we don’t have in the hiking stick activity that we might need to delete out? So we’re just gonna do a comparison. Let’s start at the top and just review these two posts. Does one of them have a paragraph before they have a picture and one doesn’t have that? Does the paragraph say something like, use this fingerprint activity for your cub scouts, where the hiking stick one may say something like, your cub scouts are gonna love making their own hiking sticks that they can actually use or even give as a gift. So think about is that more compelling than the the wording that’s in that first paragraph. Think about that. What am I saying at the beginning that’s gonna make somebody wanna look down through there and and stay on that blog post a little bit longer? Then I want you to look at where your links are. If one of the blog posts has some internal links pretty high up on the page and the other one doesn’t, maybe you need to add some more links closer to the top for that one. Because it may be that people are saying, well, this blog post is not for me.

Sherry Smothermon Short [00:05:26]:

But, man, look at this. It looks like I can click over and learn about this other activity that I may be more interested in. Compare those 2 blog posts and figure out what do you need to do. This is gonna be a lot of trial and error on your part, and what works for my blog is not gonna work for your blog. That’s one of my pet peeves because somebody will come along and say, oh, you must do this to be successful on your blog, or this is the only way to grow your blog. Okay. But that might not work for your specific niche and your specific voice and your specific blog. So you have to try things.

Sherry Smothermon Short [00:06:00]:

Try them out. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, revert back to what you had and try something else. This is gonna be trial and error for you.

Liz Stapleton [00:06:09]:

Alright. That’s it. Thanks for tuning in for the Blogger Breakthrough Summit podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your fellow bloggers. Remember, you can always learn more about our fantastic speakers in the show notes, so check those out below. And until next time, keep blogging.