I’m very interested to hear about your thesis project and wondered if you would like to have a discussion about engagement and additional metrics which, like engagement, are indicators of mindsets or intent of site users. I think I speak for all of us when I say we’d love to hear more:

Please see my most recent post:

http://daniel.webanalyticsdemystified.com/2008/05/08/thinking-outside-of-out-of-the-box-in-commercial-web-analytics/

and email me directly if you are interested.

Sincerely,

Daniel Shields

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

Bill: Just like Frank, you raise a good point. In my next post I’ll share some of the basis for my calculations and I’d love your critique of the formula I’m using. It’s not super complex and easy to change so hopefully my good readers will facilitate the refinement of this potentially powerful metric!

Now go deleted your cookies ;-)

Thanks to everyone who has written in via email and comments. I’ll work on catching up on the feedback over the weekend.

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.