Cost per Engaged Visit
Media spend divided by the number of site visits that meet a minimum engagement threshold (e.g., 2+ pages, 30+ seconds, or a scroll-depth trigger).
“Are we paying for real attention, or just clicks that immediately bounce?”
How efficiently paid media is buying genuine attention, correcting for click fraud and low-intent traffic.
Whether engaged visitors convert into leads or customers — pair with a downstream conversion rate.
Numerator
Total Media Spend
Denominator
Number of Engaged Visits (visits meeting the engagement threshold)
Example
$25,000 in spend drives 100,000 clicks, of which 20,000 meet the engagement threshold. Cost per Engaged Visit = $25,000 / 20,000 = $1.25.
Recommended visualization: Trend line with cost-per-engaged-visit benchmark band
Define 'engaged visit' once at the org level (e.g., GA4 'engaged session' default: 10s+ or 2+ pageviews or a conversion event) and apply it consistently across all channel reporting.
- Confirm the engagement threshold definition matches across GA4 and any secondary analytics tool
- Filter out bot traffic before calculating
- Reconcile spend data timing with click/session timing (same reporting window)
- Changing the engagement threshold definition mid-quarter, breaking trend comparability
- Ignoring this metric in favor of raw CPC, which rewards cheap-but-low-quality traffic
Get a conversational, stakeholder-friendly explanation of this KPI, generated on demand.