Over a decade ago, one of the primary metrics for measuring a website’s effectiveness was page views (PV). That is, the number of times a page was viewed.
Page views (roughly speaking) count how many times a page is opened. So in extreme cases, someone could simply open and close the same page repeatedly, and the number would keep going up. In fact, many people artificially inflated this number through such tactics in the past.
However, as technology has evolved, engagement has become one of the more important metrics in recent years.
According to Google, engagement is defined as any of the following:
a) Spending more than 10 seconds on a page
b) Taking an action such as making an inquiry or a purchase (technically called a conversion event)
c) Navigating to another page on the same site
If any one of these conditions is met, the session is considered “engaged.”
The opposite of engagement is a bounce. In other words, if a visitor views a page briefly and then immediately closes it without interacting, it’s counted as a bounce.
Engagement rate and bounce rate are inversely related. If you add them together, you get 1 (or 100%).
It’s said that Google uses engagement as one of the factors to determine the value of a webpage. A page where users bounce after one second is seen as low in value, whereas a page where users stay for more than 10 seconds or view other pages is considered high value.
Therefore, improving engagement, or put another way- reducing bounce rate, is very important for SEO today.
