12 Must-Track Customer & User Engagement Metrics
- December 12, 2022
Highly engaged users are the key to building a sustainable, successful product. But building an engaged user base isn’t easy.
Today, customers have countless distractions all fighting for their attention, from new apps, tools, and content – making it harder than ever to maintain engagement.
Understanding how your users engage with your product is the first step in building a loyal, engaged customer base. With the right metrics and KPIs, you can make better decisions that lead to happier, more active users, ultimately creating better product experiences that drive higher product adoption rates.
Let’s dive into what those crucial user engagement insights are and what they tell you about your user base.
What are the most important customer and user engagement metrics to track?
- DAUs, MAUs, WAUs
- Number of logins
- Onboarding completion rate
- Product adoption rate
- Feature adoption and usage
- Time-to-first action
- Average session duration
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- User dropoffs
- Help content consumption
- Customer retention rate
- Support ticket volume
What is User Engagement?
User engagement is a catch-all term for how your customers use your product or app. It can include how frequently they log in, how much time they spend in your product or app, or even how infrequently they engage with your product.
Engaged users will look very different from product to product. For example, some tools are designed to be used multiple times a day, while others may only be used a few times a month or seasonally. That’s why it’s essential to measure your user engagement based on your company’s unique goals.
12 Most Important User Engagement Metrics to Track in 2023
Because user engagement is so broad, there are several different metrics you can measure. Here are the top twelve user engagement metrics to track, measure, benchmark, and build on in 2023.
1. DAUs, WAUs, MAUs
Your daily active users (DAU), weekly active users (WAU), and monthly active users (MAU) are one of the most common user engagement metrics because it tells you the specific number of people who engage with your product over that specific period. It’s a great way to see how frequently your users take action on your app or product.
What counts as an “active” user will look different from platform to platform. You may count an active user as someone who logs into their account, or you may want to get more specific and only count users as active if they perform a specific action or task.
You can use DAU, WAU, or MAU to measure the effectiveness of marketing tactics, customer retention, and growth. When tracking DAU, WAU, and MAU, it’s also essential to note the events or campaigns that may have impacted spikes (or dips) in activity.
2. Number of Logins
Number of logins is a relatively basic metric, but it’s still a good indicator of whether or not a user is still engaging with your product. Measuring the number of logins can give you a quick glimpse into whether your customer base is growing or if you’re just acquiring users who stop engaging after creating accounts.
Comparing the number of logins to other metrics, such as active users, can help you identify how many users may be accessing their accounts but not performing the bare minimum tasks. For example, you may find users are logging in, but they’re not completing your required “active” task. This may indicate a disconnect or issue that you need to resolve, or you may need to reevaluate if your “active” metric is a poor measurement.
3. Onboarding Completion Rate
Onboarding completion rate is the percentage of customers that finish your user onboarding flow.
Knowing your onboarding completion rate can help you identify areas of improvement when educating new users on how to get the most out of your product. Tracking where they fall out of the process can help you find gaps or overly complex areas that could be refined.
Onboarding completion rate could also give you insight into whether you’re converting the right leads. If your onboarding rate is particularly low, you might find that your new users don’t fit your target audience. Refining your sales process to onboard fewer but more aligned users can lead to better long-term retention.
4. Product Adoption Rate
Your product adoption rate is the percentage of new users who reach the full value of your product. To find your product adoption rate, you must determine when a user has reached full product value. This might be completing your onboarding process, using a certain feature, or a consistent login rate.
You can find your product adoption rate by taking the number of active users and divide it by the total number of user sign-ups and multiply by 100. Here is the formula:
Product adoption rate = (New active users / sign-ups) x 100
Similarly to the onboarding completion rate, your product adoption rate can tell you how many of your new users are engaging with your product.
5. Feature Adoption Rate
Feature adoption rate is similar to product adoption rate, but it looks at specific features within your product or platform. The equation for finding feature adoption rate is:
Feature adoption rate = (Active feature users / total users) x 100
Feature adoption rate lets you identify your most popular tools, as well as those that might need extra support, better onboarding attention, or a more robust new feature announcement strategy. If you discover that some of your features aren’t popular among your users, you can make adjustments to meet their needs better or consider eliminating those particular features.
6. Time-to-First Action
Time-to-first action measures the time between when a new user signs up for your product and when they perform a certain task or activity. Measuring time-to-first action lets you see how quickly new users engage with your product and specific product features.
Use this metric to improve your onboarding experience. You want time-to-first action to be as short as possible, so identify areas where users may lag and refine onboarding and customer education materials to help them find value in your features faster.
7. Average Session Duration
Average session duration measures the average time a user spends engaging with your app. Depending on the nature of your platform, session duration may be a more critical metric than logins or the number of actions performed.
Average session duration can give you a better understanding of how well your tool is meeting customer needs. If they’re quickly logging in and back out, there may be missed opportunities.
8. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS measures customer loyalty and satisfaction. To find your NPS, survey your users, asking where on a scale of 0 to 10 they’d rank the likelihood they’d recommend your brand to a friend or colleague.
Although NPS requires a bit more effort to collect than just tracking analytics, it can be a great way to get direct product feedback from your users. It gives you a quick picture of how well you connect with your users and if you’re on the right track to building a loyal customer base.
9. User Drop-offs
User drop-off rate track where your customers or visitors are exiting your app or website after starting to engage. For example, if a user begins filling out a form but doesn’t complete and submit that form, it would count as a user drop-off.
Measuring user drop-offs helps you identify gaps in your funnel or areas where your users might need more clarification or support.
10. Help Content Consumption
You want your users to engage with your help content, but if they’re spending too much time reading how-tos or support materials, it could be a sign that your onboarding process is missing the mark or your product is overly complex.
Measuring users’ help content consumption can help you find common questions amongst your users so you can improve your product.
11. Customer Retention Rate
In order to grow, you need to retain customers. Customer retention rate tells you how many of your users are sticking around from month to month or year to year. To find customer retention rate, use this formula:
Customer retention rate = (End number of customers – New customers gained) / Starting number of customers
Customer retention rate is one of the most valuable metrics for user engagement because it shows how well you meet existing customer needs. If your retention rate is low, you’re missing the mark, and it’s time to conduct a retention analysis to find out why.
12. Support Ticket Volume
Support ticket volume tells you how many help requests your customers are submitting.
While you want your customers to be able to ask for support when they need it, a high volume of tickets could indicate that your product is too complex or your onboarding process isn’t working. It may also push your support team to consider a support ticket prioritization strategy to help them resolve more critical tickets first.
Support tickets can also be an early sign that a function or feature is broken. An unexpected spike in tickets will alert you that there is something your engineering or product team needs to fix.
Just tracking customer and user engagement metrics is only the start. Once you have those numbers, you need to know how to implement changes to make improvements.
Improving your onboarding process is a great way to improve several critical user engagement metrics. A digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix empowers product managers to build in-app guidance in a no-code editor, such as product tours, onboarding flows, new feature walkthroughs, announcements, tooltips, self-help wikis, and more to improve the overall user experience and contextualize it to certain user cohorts.
Whatfix also enables product teams to analyze these user flows and in-app content with product analytics, as well as gather in-app feedback with no-code survey creation tools.
Ready to improve user engagement, increase retention, and start creating loyal customer advocates? Learn more about Whatfix’s product adoption and analytics platform now!
Thank you for subscribing!