How do you calculate engagement? Part I

Eric,

I think you have a flaws in both your data collection, and in the way you are thinking about engagement. I have been subscribed to your RSS feed for quite a long time, and I read it (along with many others) on a daily basis. I also have been to your web site in the past 90 days, though admittedly I don’t visit very often — mostly just to look at the status of the current Web Analytics Wednesday events.

If asked, I would consider myself an engaged visitor of your site, as I consume all of the content that you are generating, on a daily basis. Given that you push the entirety of your post in your RSS feed, I have no need to visit your site directly. (And in fact, if you were to change this to only publish snippets of your posts via RSS to force me onto the site, I would unsubscribe.) Does the fact that I am very busy, yet I can leverage the technology of a good RSS aggregator to consume your content anyway, really make me any less engaged?

PS: Let me know if you’d like to upgrade your tool to something a little more accurate. If you act by the end of the month, I might be able to get you a discount. ;)

Hi Eric. Seeing my name in your reports reminds me how hard it is to be an anonymous dog on the internet.

Seriously though, I am surprised that your analysis pegs me as one of the most engaged users to your site. I subscribe to your RSS feed via Yahoo, and eventually get around to reading each new posting, but my access is very occasional. Your email to me was the first that I was aware of the posting.

Because I use Yahoo RSS, I always come to your site to read the postings. Sometimes I poke around a bit after reading the blogs, and maybe that qualifies me as engaged, but its mostly to remind myself what is there. Without RSS, I would be a much less engaged user.

I find it interesting that Frank considers himself an engaged user, while I consider myself an occasional user. I haven’t even bought all of your books! That is backwards from your analysis. The metric sounds great, and would be very useful for the new premium content portion of Gartner’s site, but the metric needs some calibration.

Well, I wasn’t that engaged on this site before, but I am now. Eric’s posting got me thinking about engagement and I wrote up my thoughts about it, to be published in a subscriber only portion of the Gartner site. Since Eric started this, I’d like to share some of my thoughts here too….

Measuring Web Site Visitor Engagement

I think Eric is on the right track with a metric describing engagement, but it will be complex to work with and difficult to measure. Complex, because “engagement” has different meanings across applications and, without training, people will interpret it in their own way. Check out engagement at http://www.dictionary.com. It lists 75 meanings for the term. The metric won’t be successful, unless users respect it for its potential. Claims of engagement mean nothing without information about how the metric was calculated and which business goal it correlates to. Complex derived metrics like this are easy to misuse for political gain or pats on the back.

Each organization’s version of engagement will be unique. It will be derived from a number of root metrics, probably under a dozen. Common root metrics will be frequency, recency, length of visit, purchases and lifetime value. Some organizations may include visitor actions, such as subscribing, providing personal information, writing a comment, or participating in a blog. Soft metrics, such as attitude, influence and obsession may be used. Not all root metrics will come from the Web analytic tool. Many will use metrics from other channels such as call center actions and physical store visits. After relevance, the ability to capture quality measurements are key factors in choosing root metrics,

With a laundry list of root metrics to choose from, what is the starting point? Engagement has to correlate with a core business goal, so that improving engagement helps achieve the goal. To calibrate the correlation, the engagement calculation should be normalized by scoring and weighting each root metric. That way, adjustments can be made until the model runs true. Initial calibration might take six months, and recalibration is an ongoing process.

After some experience, advanced organizations might graph the metrics which make up engagement on a spider diagram. The spider will change as unique visitor segments are examined, and should reveal some non-obvious correlations. For example, RSS driven visitors may be engaged differently than those driven by search engines – yet still have similar total engagement scores. The result is a fine grained understanding of how different types of customers are engaged with a Web site, and increased ability to make business decisions that match customer intent with business goals

Hi, everybody. The discussed topic about customer engagement is the subject of my research for my bachelor thesis. I am trying to develop a scale which measure the success of online marketing strategies, using the level of Customer Engagement as a criterion. I am still in the beginning of my research, so every piece of information, every opinion or suggestion is welcome. Till now, I have some ideas about the possible measurement. In my opinion, everything said or written about it is completely true, but also it is useless without direct specifications and adjustments to a particular industry, business, company’s size, objectives and many other factors which influence business conditions. The most important is the profit contribution brought by customer engagement. At the end everything comes to profit. Therefore it should not be underestimated.May be engagement is not just online activity. May be the more weight should be given to the physical activity, such as ordering and purchase. As Bill wrote above, although he hasn’t buy all the books, he is considered as an engaged customer. On the other side, some more profitable customers might not be considered just because they do not have enough time to browse the Web. And finally, why do we measure Customer Engagement? It is not just rating, is it? We have to apply the results in order to extract valuable information about the customers and their online and offline behavior. We have to use this information for better segmentation of the target market and improvement of our services and offerings. So if this is the actual goal of the campaign, shouldn’t we reconsider once more the definition of this term and simplify it to the extend at which it would be easily handled and efficiently used whenever needed?
p.s. these are just my first impressions on the above topic. I am not a professional, neither a scholar. I would like to share my thoughts in order to provoke a reaction from your side such as critics, corrections, opinions. For me is important to develop a realistic and objective model. So I need your replay!!!
Kind Regards!
Valentina