Product Engagement

What is product engagement?

Product engagement is the level to which users interact with your product or service, which can be measured in terms of frequency of use and feature adoption, among others, over time.

Customers ultimately end their journey by choosing to subscribe to your B2B SaaS platform because your solution gets the job done and checks most, if not all, of their must-haves. But how can you ensure that your current customers are getting all of the potential value out of your product and are integrating it into their everyday workflow enough to drive long-term, recurring revenue? That is where measuring key factors such as product engagement comes into play.

Product engagement is usually summarized into a score either by user, a cohort or platform-wide and is driven by data generated from customers’ direct interactions with your product and fed into product experience software.

Why is measuring product engagement important?

When used in conjunction with other customer analytics such as user engagement, NPS scores and in-app feedback, product engagement metrics add deep visibility into how your customers are using your product. This information can be used to drive the identification and prioritization of new and enhanced features, inform modifications to the interface to boost the user experience and boost your company’s opportunity to benefit from product-led growth.

In particular, utilizing product engagement metrics can help to answer questions such as:

• Which features are customers using the most and which are not offering as much value?
• How are customers responding to different types of layouts or interfaces?
• Which customers are reducing their use of your product and how have they used it so far?
• Which features are driving engagement and which are causing more strain on customer support staff?

Similarly, just like creating customer personas helps support sales and marketing efforts, product engagement metrics can help your company better understand and refine your product to meet your customers’ needs. In addition to answering questions like those listed above, users can then be put into groups so they can be targeted with different types of resources or content, narrowed to better understand their activity or even offered different pricing or feature options.

For example, in one of the first studies to group customers based on how they engage with a product, users were broken into five groups based on how many times they used a particular technology solution:

• Tourists: 1 day of use
• Interested: 2-4 days of use
• Average: 5-8 days of use
• Active: 9-15 days of use
• VIP: 16+ days of use

Obviously, the type, level of effort and frequency of communications going into the different groups are going to vary.

What are some product engagement metrics?

Product engagement metrics are often organized into three categories: activity, loyalty and popularity. Activity focuses on how and how long a site is being used. Popularity measures how much a product is being used. Loyalty is concerned with how often a user returns to a site. Your goal is a product customers utilize actively, frequently and for a long time each visit.

Based on these categories, example product engagement metrics could include:

• The number of unique users within a specific time period
• The number of unique user visits within a specific time period
• The number of clicks to a feature, page, tool, report, etc.
• The click depth, which is the average number of features or pages visited per visit
• The dwell time, which is the length of time per visit
• The number of visits for a specific user or group within a time period

The product engagement questions and the metrics that are used to answer them are going to vary by company for a lot of reasons. This is why many choose to leverage the built-in product experience tools and features available within solutions built specifically for B2B SaaS companies to jump-start their efforts.