In partnership with

Developing an effective audience engagement strategy is a pivotal step on the road towards revenue goals. Not only can it have a direct impact on monetization through impressions and advertising, but more importantly, it can lead to increased loyalty and other behaviors that indicate readers are ready to convert to subscribers.

But how do you go about tracking engagement? And what kinds of soft conversions can you integrate into the reader journey to increase engagement, loyalty, and, ultimately, the likelihood to subscribe?

In this whitepaper, we’ll detail why engagement is important, the essential KPIs for tracking it, and how to turn this measurement into actions that will optimize conversion rates.

Measuring engagement and loyalty

Holding readers’ attention is no easy feat when 45% of readers who load an article will leave within the first 15 seconds and more than 60% will not return. So while it’s important to understand how readers are discovering content, engagement comes down to optimizing experiences for the groups that are staying, monitoring the different actions they’re taking on the page, and creating more opportunities for deeper reading.

While the optimal formula for strong engagement is unique to each publisher and audience, the common thread among successful strategies is paying special attention to the following KPIs when experimenting with content and optimizing for loyalty.

Engaged Time

Engaged Time measures the average amount of time that visitors spend actively engaging with a page – time spent clicking or scrolling, for example. This metric carries more weight than pageviews or time on site because it not only identifies the topics and formats that capture readers’ attention, but the ones that hold on to it as well.

When we look at Average Engaged Time over the past few years, we see that this metric varies across the world. From 2019-2021, Latin America led all regions with 34.9 seconds of Average Engaged Time, a 1% increase during this period. Asia / Pacific, on the other hand, averaged 29.8 seconds and experienced the largest drop in engagement at -9%.

The Chartbeat Library

The Essential Engagement KPIs for Optimizing Conversion Rates

Measuring engagement and loyalty

Engaged Time

Get the full report.

Get free monthly insights and updates.

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.