Key Word: Engagement, Engagement, Engagement

Engagement, engagement, engagement. As marketers, we hear it everywhere. From social media to email marketing to web analytics. It’s everywhere and it’s everyone’s favorite word – and it’s important! It’s probably such a “buzzy” term because it’s such a vague term. It’s easy to ask about Bounces, Page Views per visit, and Page Exit Ratios, but it’s not all about the cold, hard numbers. For the purposes of this blog post, the focus will be on how engagement relates to web analytics.

It’s different for each and every company, all websites are different, visitors will all interact differently with each site, and different actions represent different things for Visitors on different sites (Darby, 2010). This leaves us with decision of what we, as marketers, have deemed important to measure. What’s going to be important to us and how are we going to understand the numbers we’re looking at?

But before we decide what will be important to us, marketers need to understand that engagement is difficult to define because it’s both qualitative and quantitative. The Time on Site could be through the roof – which could be good or bad. Maybe there is interesting data on a website, or maybe visitors are simply unable to understand that data they’re seeing.  It’s impossible to tell if a user is having a positive or negative experience unless they decide to pick up the phone and call us (or take one of those online surveys), which is why engagement is more focused on the degree of it (Kaushik, 2010).

It’s important for us to know that numbers don’t tell the entire story. They help to lay the foundation, but they don’t have all of the answers.

For example, in 2010, Philly.com used the following formula to analyze their web traffic with an “engagement index” that attempted to differentiate return readers from fly-bys (Beckett, 2010). Here’s what their senior data analyst uses:

Photo credit: Neiman Lab

Very complicated, but nonetheless interesting. They have taken the approach of not relying on the number of visitors to the site, but the number of visitors that are “engaged” with the content. Their analyst also revealed that users referred from social sites were much more engaged with the website than users coming from search engines (Kiesow, 2010).

The Tampa Bay Times has decided that such a complicated formula would not work in their favor and simply measures, “…registration numbers and their brand index, or how many people come to the site through a bookmark or by searching for terms like “St. Pete Times” or “tampabay.com.” (Beckett, 2010). Sometimes it comes down to manpower and resources available to marketers. Also, it hinges on what type of engagement an organization is looking for – and it can’t just be clicks.

It brings us back to the point that marketers are the ones that need to understand that engagement can be measured in a multitude of ways, because there is no correct answer as long as the numbers being returned are so qualitative. What do you think, should there be a hard formula for determining engagement, or is it something that should be taken on a case-by-case basis?

References:

Beckett, L. (2010, October 26). Nieman Lab. “Getting beyond just pageviews: Philly.com’s seven-part equation for measuring online engagement.” Retrieved from, http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/10/getting-beyond-just-pageviews-philly-coms-seven-part-equation-for-measuring-online-engagement/.

Darby, P. (2010). Convince&Convert. “The Hitchiker’s Guide to Tracking Website Engagement.” Retrieved from, http://www.convinceandconvert.com/digital-marketing/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-to-tracking-website-engagement/.

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web Analytics 2.0 [THE ART OF ONLINE ACCOUNTABILITY & SCIENCE OF CUSTOMER CENTRICITY]. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Kiesow, D. (2010, November 22). Poynter. “Philly.com creates “reader engagement index” to track site performance.” Retrieved from, http://www.poynter.org/media-innovation/media-lab/social-media/106892/philly-com-creates-reader-engagement-index-to-track-site-performance/.