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the Free CMSWire NewsletterWe learned in The Keys to Understanding Web Customer Engagement that the notions of web presence and customer engagement aren’t new — but are gaining in interest as web presence expands beyond the corporate website and as companies must know more about effective means of connecting to customers. Many questions swirl around understanding what engagement is, what defining characteristics should be measured and why, how to align metrics to goals and which metrics matter the most. This article explores a sampling of goals and metrics for measuring and understanding engagement on the Web.
Different Strokes for Different Folks: the Many Faces of Engagement Metrics
I’m going to run through a number of metric matrices proposed by several sources to illustrate different approaches and ways of organizing engagement measurement.
Web Properties Owned by Organizations
In the Forrester report Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007, four main components are identified as attributes for customer engagement:
- Involvement — Measurable aspects of an individual connection to an organization or brand
- Interaction — Depth/breadth of an individual connection
- Intimacy — Sentiment of an individual towards organization/brand
- Influence — Indicators that an individual will encourage someone else to visit, consider or buy
Forrester: Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007
Goals & Metrics According to Eric Peterson
Eric Peterson, of Web Analytics Demystified and well-known in this field, published a multi-part blog series in 2006 on engagement (I recommend reading the entire series). Here are a couple of his notions regarding the selection of metrics:
Engagement goals:
(Example) - Based on my knowledge of my site visitors and their long-term usage patterns, my engagement goals are as follows:
- I would like that visitors would view and interact with certain content on my site
- I would like visitors to subscribe to this weblog to stay connected
- I would like visitors to maintain a low recency with my content, regardless of whether they’re reading blog posts or viewing pages on my site
- When visitors are on my web site, I would like them to spend a reasonable amount of time interacting with my content
- When visitors return to my site, I prefer they remember my domain name and return to my site directly, either via a bookmark or by directly entering my URL into their browser
Key areas for metrics:
…we had been talking about how to measure engagement on their web site. We’d gone round-and-round on ideas about what constitutes an “engaged” visitor and narrowed it down to a few key areas:
- The visitor views “critical” content on the web site
- The visitor has returned to the web site recently
- The visitor returns directly to the web site some of the time
- Some high percentage of the visitor’s sessions are “long” sessions
- If available, the visitor is subscribed to at least one available site feed
Chris Meares' Perspective of Engagement
More recently, Chris Meares, senior data analyst at philly.com, home of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, applied his understanding of Eric Peterson’s work in engagement by adapting a white paper called “Measuring the Unmeasurable: Visitor Engagement” by Peterson and Joseph Carrabis. Meares collaborated with Ryan Davis, the president of Philly.com, and Wendy Warren, the vice president for content, on their formula for measuring visitor engagement. The result so far is:
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