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Engagement metrics show whether a variant keeps visitors interested. You see it in days, long before you have enough sales to call a winner. An engaging page is one where the visitor clicks through to another page, doesn’t bounce, and stays longer. ABConvert measures this on the pages your test changed, so it complements your traffic and conversion metrics, which cover the whole funnel.

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When to use it

  • Landing-page redirect tests. Run a URL redirect test between two landing pages and see which one keeps visitors clicking through instead of bouncing.
  • Template and theme tests. When a template test changes a product or collection layout, check whether the new layout earns more scroll, more clicks, and longer active time.
  • Visual editor changes. After a visual editor test rearranges a page, confirm the change helped engagement on exactly the pages it touched.
  • Guarding against side effects. When a price test changes what shoppers see, check that browsing engagement on the tested product pages didn’t drop.

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When NOT to use it

  • Measuring revenue or conversion lift. Engagement tells you whether visitors stayed and clicked, not whether they bought. Use traffic and conversion metrics instead.
  • Reconciling against GA4. These are measured per page and won’t line up with GA4’s session numbers. See the FAQ for why.
  • Tests with no page or template target. Shipping, payment, and checkout tests don’t change a specific page, so an engagement number for the whole store mixes the test in with everything else and tells you nothing. Judge those on conversion and revenue instead.

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The three metrics

Each metric is measured per page view, then totaled for the page or template in scope. The breakdown table also shows two supporting counts:
  • Page views are how many times visitors in this test loaded a page inside the scope you picked. The three rates above are all measured out of this number, so a small page-view count means the rates are still noisy.
  • Clicks are how many times visitors clicked through to another page on your store.
Example. Your redirect test sends visitors to Landing B. Control bounces 62%, Variant B bounces 48%, and Variant B also lifts click-through from 22% to 31% and keeps visitors longer on average: three signals pointing the same way. Click the Destination tab to see where click-throughs went.

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How scope works

Scope is the set of pages you want this test judged on. It matters because if you measure the whole store, the few pages your test changed get drowned out by all the pages it didn’t, and a real improvement can vanish into the average. The scope button reads Storewide, or a count like 3 pages or 2 templates. Click it to view the pages in scope, or to open the Edit scope modal. (A template is the shared layout behind a group of pages, like the layout every product page uses.) Try it: open a redirect test’s Engagement section and click the scope button.
Engagement section of the Analytics dashboard with a 4 pages scope button, showing Click-Through Rate, Bounce Rate, and Avg Time on Page cards that each compare Control and Variant A

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Default scope per test type

When a test launches, ABConvert seeds a default scope from what the test actually changes, so engagement points at the right pages from day one. For the storewide-by-default types you can still narrow scope by hand. A Reset to default action restores the launch-derived default at any time.

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Edit the scope

Open the Edit scope modal and pick a mode:
  • Storewide measures every page.
  • By URL takes one or more URL rules. Each rule has a match type: Exactly matches, Starts with, or Contains. (Visual editor tests, which support glob URLs, also offer Matches pattern.)
  • By template lets you pick templates, so engagement rolls up by template instead of by URL.
Rules seeded from the test’s launch default are tagged from test, so you can tell them from ones you added by hand.
Edit scope modal in By URL mode, with a match-type dropdown set to Exactly matches and a field to search pages or paste a URL, listing four URL rules with Contains, Starts with, and Exactly matches badges, each tagged from test, plus Reset to default, Cancel, and Apply

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Break engagement down

Breakdown tabs read the metrics across a dimension:
  • All totals the whole scope.
  • Page lists one row per URL (URL scope only).
  • Template lists one row per template (template scope only).
  • Destination shows where click-throughs went (available whenever your scope is narrower than the whole store).
  • Country, Device Type, and Traffic Source split by audience.
  • Custom combines two dimensions, for example page by destination.
Engagement breakdown table for a template-scoped test, with tabs for All, Template, Destination, Country, Device Type, Traffic Source, and Custom, and columns for CTR, Bounce, Avg time, Page views, and Clicks per test group
A click-through counts whenever a visitor moves to another page on your store, by a link, a button, or submitting a form, not just tracked link clicks. Going to another website doesn’t count.

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Common mistakes

  • Benchmarking against GA4. GA4 measures engagement per session with proxies; ABConvert measures it per page directly. The numbers are built differently and won’t match. Compare variant against control inside ABConvert.
  • Leaving scope at Storewide on a redirect or template test. A few changed pages get diluted by every untouched page, and the lift disappears. Use the launch-derived default, or scope by URL or template to the pages the test changes.
  • Expecting data for anonymous visitors. Engagement is only collected after a visitor is assigned to a test, so unassigned traffic never appears.
  • Comparing Click-Through Rate across different scopes. A rate measured over product pages and a rate measured storewide aren’t the same denominator. Keep the scope fixed when you compare.

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FAQ

A visitor moving to another page on your store, by a link, a button, or submitting a form, not just tracked link clicks. Going to another website doesn’t count.
When the visitor scrolled, clicked through, or stayed active for over 10 seconds. A view with none of those counts as a bounce.
Click-Through Rate is onward navigations divided by page views. Bounce Rate is 1 minus engaged page views divided by page views. Avg Time on Page is the average active (foreground) time per page view, including the last page a visitor saw.
No. It counts only active, in-focus time. Time the tab sits in the background is excluded. The exit page is included in the average.
They are not meant to. ABConvert measures engagement per page at page grain; GA4 measures it per session with proxies. Use ABConvert’s numbers to compare variant against control, not to reconcile with GA4. See GA4 integration.
ABConvert seeds it from what the test changes at launch. Edit it any time; Reset to default restores the seeded scope. See How scope works.
Yes. In the Edit scope modal choose By template and pick your templates. The breakdown then shows a Template tab with one row per template.
With a non-storewide scope, open the Destination breakdown tab. It lists where click-throughs went, so you can read flows like homepage to a specific product page.
For how to read whether a difference is real rather than noise, see statistical significance and the Analytics overview.