- Monitor the bounce rate. These are the visitors who 'land and leave', i.e. visit one page and depart. A low bounce rate indicates that visitors are engaging with other pages/areas in the site. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless you are delivering e-commerce or a service that requires multipage interaction.
- Monitor the Average Visit Duration of a visitor session. The longer the better, it suggests a visitor is either reading and engaging with your content, or that they are engaging with multiple pages/areas in the site.
- Check the % New Visits. This is the percentage of your traffic that originates from new IP addresses or IP/Browser combinations. A large percentage of new visits could suggest superficial site visits that are never repeated. A large figure might also suggest (in combination with other data) that the activity attracted to the site is growing.
Engagement is a difficult quality to assess. One way, while site traffic is relatively low, might be to require direct registration or email contact from visitors who wish to access reports, white papers and other documents (mainly PDF files). You could then deliver their requests directly after having obtained some key marketing data (name, demographic, market, company affiliation, permission to contact etc). If you get large numbers of these requests then you will have to consider automating the same process. These systems will probably involve cookie software and therefore will need to comply with EU legislation on obtaining visitor's consent for the use of cookies or other tracking technology.
Note that any initiative to gather or harvest visitor/market data will also have to comply with EU and national legislation on data protection (link for Ireland). Your organisation will need to establish the role of 'Data Manager' in addition to policy and procedures for handling these requirements.
