Reading engagement on your public pages

Your public pages, the articles, guides and landing pages anyone can read, are the front door of your membership. They attract visitors from search and social media, earn trust and invite people to take a first step. Analytics will give you plenty of numbers about how people behave on them: bounce rate, time on page, scroll depth, exits. The trouble is that these numbers are easy to misread. A page with a high bounce rate can be doing excellent work, and a page where people linger can be failing completely.

Reading engagement well starts with a simple idea: judge every page against the job it was built to do.

What bounce actually tells you

A bounce is usually a visit that views one page and leaves without doing anything else your analytics can detect. Some tools define it more generously, counting a visit as engaged if the person stayed a reasonable time, viewed another page or completed a conversion, and treating everything else as a bounce. Check which definition your tool uses before comparing figures over long periods, because a change of tool or setting can shift the number overnight.

Either way, a bounce only tells you that the visitor did not go further on this occasion. Someone who searched a question, read your complete answer and left satisfied is a bounce. So is someone who arrived, saw a wall of text and left within three seconds. The bounce rate cannot tell those two people apart. Other signals can.

Give each page a job

Most public pages on a membership site fall into one of three types, and each should be judged differently:

• Answer pages, such as a how-to article. Success is the visitor reading the answer and ideally taking a small next step, like joining your email list. A single-page visit is fine if they actually read.
• Bridge pages, such as your home page or a topic hub. Their job is to send people somewhere else. Here a high bounce rate is a real problem.
• Decision pages, such as your sales page or pricing page. Success is a sign-up or trial start, so conversions matter more than anything else.

The signals worth reading

• Engaged time. How long people actively spend on the page. Averages are pulled around by a few visitors who leave a tab open, so look at the typical figure where your tool offers it, and compare pages of similar length.
• Scroll depth. How far down people get. If most stop before your main point or your invitation to subscribe, they never saw it.
• Next page. Where visitors go after this page. For bridge pages this is the key measure.
• Conversions from the page. Email sign-ups, trial starts and paid sign-ups that began on it. This is the closest measure to value.

A worked example

Take a hypothetical stained glass membership run by a glass artist named Bashir. The figures are invented to illustrate. He compares two public articles over a month:

• How to cut glass without cracking it: 3,000 visits, mostly from search. 2,100 were single-page visits. Typical engaged time about three minutes, and roughly half of visitors reached the end. 45 email sign-ups.
• Ten stained glass projects to try: 2,000 visits, mostly from social media. 1,000 were single-page visits. Typical engaged time about 40 seconds, and few visitors scrolled past the third project. 6 email sign-ups.

On bounce alone, the glass-cutting article looks worse: 2,100 of 3,000 visits against 1,000 of 2,000. But it produces 1.5 sign-ups per 100 visits against 0.3 for the projects list, and people read it to the end. It is an answer page doing its job.

The projects article is the one to fix. People click around a little, but they stop reading early and rarely subscribe. Bashir suspects the title promised quick projects while the page opens with a long history of stained glass. He moves the first project to the top, adds a short invitation to download a free project pattern after the third project, and compares the next month.

Break the numbers down before you decide

Engagement varies hugely by where visitors came from and what device they used. Visitors from social media often skim and leave; visitors from search usually arrive with a specific question. A page that gained social traffic will look less engaging even if nothing about it changed. Before acting, compare the same page by traffic source and by phone versus computer. If engagement is poor only on phones, the problem is probably layout rather than content.

Match the symptom to the fix

• Quick exits from search visitors: the page may not answer what people searched for. Revisit search intent and make sure the answer appears early.
• People stop reading near the top: strengthen the opening, using the techniques in writing introductions that keep people reading.
• Good reading, no next step: add one relevant invitation, such as a related guide or an email sign-up, where readers finish.
• Poor engagement on phones only: review text size, image weight and the article layout.

A monthly engagement review

1. List your ten most visited public pages and label each as an answer, bridge or decision page.
2. For each, note engaged time, scroll depth, the main next page and conversions.
3. Split the figures by traffic source and device.
4. Pick the one page where the numbers most clearly fall short of its job.
5. Make one change to that page and note the date.
6. Compare the same figures a month later, then choose the next page.