11 Customer Engagement Metrics Businesses Should Track

Communication is central to building relationships with customers. And today, communication happens constantly on multiple channels, like a business’ website, social media profiles, phone calls, and more.

So to understand how effectively you engage customers across all these touchpoints, you must track customer engagement metrics. But with so many channels and platforms to track, where do you begin?

In this post, we’ll look at 11 of the most common digital customer engagement metrics for businesses to track. The most important metrics for your business will depend on your goals and customer engagement strategies, but these are good starting points for most industries.

First, some definitions.

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement refers to the interactions between your business and customers that help build relationships and nurture loyalty. It encompasses engagement strategies across channels and throughout the customer journey.

This is not to be confused with customer experience, which is how customers feel about these interactions. The easiest way to think of the distinction is:

• Customer engagement focuses on your business’ efforts to build customer relationships
• Customer experience focuses on how customers respond to these efforts

These concepts are intrinsically linked, so there’s some overlap in the metrics to measure them, as we’ll discuss later.

Now, let’s dive into how to measure customer engagement.

Website metrics

Much of the early engagement with customers in the discovery phase happens on your website. This is the digital face of your company, so it’s crucial to understand whether your website gives customers the information they need and keeps them engaged.

The following metrics help you gather this insight, and you can track them in Google Analytics (GA). You can also measure similar metrics for your app.

• Average session duration: This metric measures the average length of time users spend on your website, from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave (or after they’ve been inactive for 30 minutes). In GA, you can also see the pages users spend the most time on, giving you an idea of which pages are most engaging. For example, if users spend a long time on a particular blog post, this could indicate that they find the information useful. However, it’s essential to consider average session rate alongside other website metrics, like click-through rate and conversion rate, to fully understand what drives your engagement goals.
• Pages per session: This metric measures the number of pages a user visits during a single session on your website. It can indicate how interested they are in your content and how useful they find it. Additionally, it can also reveal the efficiency of your site structure and internal linking. Do these create a clear path for the user to get from one page to the next and find the information they need? Again, it’s worth considering this metric alongside others like conversion rate to fully understand the context. For example, if a user lands on a landing page and converts, they’ll have only viewed one page per session. However, in this case, it’s not a bad sign because you achieved your conversion goal.
• Engagement rate: This metric measures customer engagement on your website based on factors like session duration, conversions, and pageviews. GA considers an engaged session to be one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has at least 2 pageviews, or has a conversion event (like a form submission or purchase). In short, the engagement rate is the percentage of engaged sessions on your website.
• Bounce rate: This metric measures the percentage of sessions that don’t qualify as engaged based on the criteria above.
• Conversion rate: This metric measures the percentage of users who complete an action, like signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase, helping to provide the necessary context to understand other metrics on the list. The actions you track as conversions will depend on your engagement goals. In addition to tracking conversion rate on your website and ad campaigns using GA, you can also track conversions on other channels, like email, SMS, and social media, using various marketing tools.

Marketing metrics

Marketing campaigns help you stay engaged with existing and potential customers through channels like social media, SMS, email, and search ads. The following metrics help you understand marketing campaign performance. You can track these using various marketing tools, such as the analytics dashboard through your email service provider or social media platform.

• Click-through rate (CTR): This metric measures the percentage of customers who clicked on a link or call to action on your marketing asset. For example, you can measure CTR in an email newsletter or social media ad. CTR helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign: if it’s high, it indicates that the content engages customers and encourages them to click through to learn more. And if it’s low, it’s a sign you might need to reevaluate the copy or other elements to drive more engagement.
• Social media engagement rate: This metric measures the percentage of followers or audiences who interact with a social media post through likes, comments, and shares. Each social media platform tracks this metric differently, but all have some way of measuring how users engage with your posts. This helps you understand what resonates with your audience. When tracking this metric, pay attention to the total audience that saw your post, as sometimes social media posts will reach people who don’t follow your account. In this case, the engagement rate would include the total reach (the number of people who saw your post) instead of your total followers.

Customer experience metrics

As mentioned before, there’s some overlap between customer engagement and customer experience metrics, with the latter giving you an idea of how engaged customers feel. We dive deeper into customer experience metrics in this post, but let’s take a look at some of the most important metrics for customer engagement.

Because these metrics closely tie to customer service interactions, a great place to track them is your contact center platform’s analytics dashboard.

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): This metric measures customers’ satisfaction after an experience with your business, such as a customer service interaction, sales call, or onboarding. Businesses measure CSAT through surveys that ask customers to rate their experience on a numbered scale. CSAT is valuable to understand the effectiveness of your customer engagement strategies and identify areas for improvement.
• Net promoter score (NPS): This metric measures brand advocacy by asking customers if they would recommend your business to a family member, friend, or colleague. After a customer interacts with your brand, you can measure NPS through a survey that asks how likely they would be to recommend your brand on a scale from 0 to 10. The results can give you insight into whether your customer engagement efforts resonate with customers. After all, only the most engaged customers will be willing to recommend your business.
• Customer retention rate: This metric measures the percentage of existing customers who stay with your business during a specific period. Customer retention directly relates to customer engagement, as engaged customers are more likely to stick around.
• Customer churn rate: This metric measures the percentage of customers who leave your business during a specific period. It’s the opposite of customer retention rate and equally valuable to measure. That’s because a high churn rate can indicate a lack of customer engagement, so tracking this metric can help you identify where customers drop off and adjust your strategies to engage them and prevent churn.

Track and improve customer engagement with Twilio Flex

Measuring customer engagement helps businesses identify which tactics perform best and where to make improvements—but that’s just the first step. The next step is to make sure you have the right tools to engage customers on their preferred channels and improve their experience.

A great starting point is a contact center platform that enables you to provide frictionless, personalized engagement. That’s exactly what you can do with Twilio Flex.

With Flex, you can build a contact center that fits your needs, including:

• A collection of new customer engagement channels that work alongside your existing systems
• A flexible analytics dashboard where you can track the most important metrics to your business
• A single user interface where employees can access customer data and engage customers across channels
• A host of AI integrations that help surface recommended responses to save agents time

Discover how Flex can help you improve customer engagement.

Then, use your contact center tools and data to create seamless, personalized engagement across the customer journey. Check out how 2 retailers harness the power of personalization for better customer engagement in How can Retailers Create a Better Customer Journey?