4 UX KPIs You Should be Tracking (But Most Likely Aren’t)

author

François Dejoie

September 6, 2017 | 3 min read

Last Updated: Feb 27, 2023


When marketers want to measure their website performance, they often rely on indicators like conversion rates, bounce rates, session duration, or number of page views.

Just like a doctor conducting a routine check-up on his patient, the use of basic KPIs is an excellent way of monitoring your website’s “health” and a good way to find symptoms of bad user experience. Yet, when it comes to understanding the exact cause of these symptoms, and coming up with the right optimization decisions, traditional analytics are simply not enough.

Here’s 4 KPIs you might not have heard of, but that could become crucial to your online business success.

1. Click repetition

What is it ? The number of clicks in a row on the same page element. If this indicator gets past 2, it’s a clear sign that your users are getting frustrated. There could be several reasons for this: design misconceptions, bugs, unclear CTAs…

img 1Let’s look at an example. The screenshot opposite is taken from a fashion retailer’s website. We can see that the image is clicked over and over more than 5 times on average… The reason behind it is that the eye-shaped icon, suggesting you can zoom-in or enlarge the image, doesn’t trigger any action at all. That’s typically the type of frustrating experience you want to avoid on a retail website.
Click repetition also often brings to light a very common and underestimated problem for e-commerce websites : the lack of feedback at important stages of the browsing experience. Think of when you put a product in your basket: you’re expecting a confirmation, but what if this confirmation isn’t clear or takes too long to be delivered ? Chances are you click again, and again.
You need to ensure that you prevent this kind of negative experience by tracking this KPI.

On a sidenote, be careful not to misunderstand click repetition for “click addiction” as, for instance, users compulsively clicking on a slideshow could trigger the same KPI.

2. Activity rate

When a page fails to meet the needs of the visitors, they usually leave, thus generating a high bounce rate. But how do we know whether this bounce is due to inadequate content or to an interaction problem within the page ?

The “time spent” by users on a particular page could give us a hint, but it could be tricky. Indeed, what we really want to know is if people interact with the page.

“Activity rate” measures the time spent interacting within the page. In the case of a page with a high bounce rate, a low activity rate would point out a problem in acquisition strategy. To the contrary, a high activity rate would lead us to understand that users leave because the page isn’t responding properly to their interactions.
Thanks to understanding the activity rate, you know what to investigate.

On the following image, we see that “bouncing users” leave the homepage without doing anything (4%), whereas on the product page, they interact before leaving (25%).

img 2.1

3. Engagement rate

We can all agree that creating efficient “call-to-action” buttons is crucial to conversion, but it is also an art. A slight change of words can have huge effect on clicks-through. When you need to figure out which CTAs are more appealing to your users, and which ones are less appealing, engagement rate comes in handy.

In the menu below, we clearly see that “Exclusive offers” is by far the most affording category of the menu, with 12. 6% engagement rate.

img 3

A low engagement rate would reveal that the wording is unclear, or maybe that two categories seem to describe the same thing.
By monitoring this KPI, optimizing and reorganizing your menus and CTAs for better performance becomes significantly easier.

4. Time before first click

Have you ever wanted to know if your checkout page could perform better ? Assessing the time before click would uncover significant insight into being able to address this.

The following two CTAs are checkout validation buttons, taken from two different websites.

img4

img5

On the first website, users take 43.8 seconds to review their checkout list before clicking on “validate”.
On the second website, it takes them 66.6 seconds to accomplish the same action. That’s 23 seconds longer, and yet the checkout page is way simpler in that case. It’s obvious that something isn’t clear and takes time for users to understand.

Conclusion

Advanced UX Analytics are empowering marketers with a new generation of KPIs that offer to show how users really behave while browsing, leaving intuition aside and allowing data-driven optimization.
Click repetition, activity rate, engagement rate, time before click are some of the new indicators that help leading retailers minimise errors and hesitation times, equipping leading e-commerce brands with the ability to provide a seamless user experience.

What’s your opinion about KPIs ? Tweet us what you think @ContentSquare

To discover how UX Analytics can help you with your business, visit contentsquare.com