Which is better, traffic or engagement?
Have you ever had a post that went viral, bringing plenty of traffic to your site but very few comments or interactions? Would you consider that to be a good or a bad thing?
The reality is, engagement is actually extremely tricky to measure. While traffic can be measured by page views, time spent on the site and sources, engagement is more complicated. How can you measure how engaged a visitor is with your brand? The answer is for you to take a qualitative approach to your social media activities, rather than a quantitative one.
Measuring based on the amount of time people spend on the site assumes that those who spend longer there are automatically more engaged. However, how do you know that the person who only logged on for a couple of minutes wasn’t a regular visitor who found exactly what he or she wanted straight away? Your readers could already be engaged and maybe they don’t need to spend time browsing through the website, like a less engaged visitor would.
Comments are one indicator of how engaged your visitors are, particularly when they comment regularly or take the time to leave extended opinions. Keeping track of how many people share your content is also an indicator of its appeal.
Overall, you should try and aim for an equal measure of traffic and engagement. The traffic will win visitors over, but high-quality content and a decent social media strategy will keep them coming back for more.
How do you measure the engagement with your brand? Do you rate traffic above engagement?
Source: Econsultancy
