Our Engagement Metric in use at Philly.com

Published by Eric T. Peterson on October 26, 2010.

Those of you who have read my blog for long know that I have written a tremendous amount about measures of visitor engagement online. In addition to numerous blog posts we have published a 50 page white paper describing how to measure visitor engagement and every year I give a half-dozen presentations on the subject. Unlike some people who seem to fear new ideas and others who disapprove of anything they themselves do not create I have long been a champion for evolving our use of metrics in web analytics to satisfy business needs.

But don’t take my word for it, read about how the nice folks at Philly.com are using a near complete version of my calculation to better understand their audience.

Cool, huh?

The thing I love about this article is that Philly.com is openly talking about their use of my engagement metric. What’s better is that their sharing prompted another super-great organization (PBS) to comment that they too have been using my engagement metric for years.

Awesome.

I have been honored to work with several companies in the past three years who have implemented my metric and variations thereof but most treat the metric as a competitive secret. Given that most are in the hard-pressed and hyper-competitive online media world I understand, but I’m certainly happy to see Philly.com and Chris Meares share their story with the world.

Anyway, check out the article and, if you’re brave, download our white paper on visitor engagement and give it a read. If you are in media and are stuck trying to figure out how to get web analytics to work for you (instead of the other way around) give me a call. I’m more than happy to discuss how our measure of engagement might be able to help your business grow.

About Eric T. Peterson

Eric T. Peterson is the founder of Web Analytics Demystified, Inc. and the author of Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks, and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators. Mr. Peterson frequently presents on web analytics, is often cited in articles about digital measurement, and has been blogging on the subject since 2004.

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Eric T. Peterson's Blog at Web Analytics Demystified

Posted Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 | 2 responses | Share, Save or Email

http://blog.scoutanalytics.com Scout Analytics

In publishing, engagement is the unit of monetization. Going the next step of correlating engagement and revenue is the trick to optimizing the value of an audience. Our recent announcement about Elsevier BI is a good example of this (http://www.scoutanalytics.com/press_release_full.asp?pdx=49).
Ryan E

Nice! I remember years back, while with the Omniture best practices team, suggesting a combination of events to represent engagement. I was surprised by a rebuff that it was not objective enough. Glad to see you have the tenacity and courage to try it out.