News of TNT and TBS inking a three-year deal to carry the
SAG Awards could be a sign that the program had enough hutzpah to move
audiences. It’s hard to tell when you’re measuring engagement based on the data
that’s transmitted from a sample of television sets. More than 5.2 million tuned in, but how many
were actually watching the program and was this number taken two minutes into
the program?
Measuring engagement is hard and in terms of Web analytics,
it just can’t be done. Not, yet.
Still baffled by engagement, Web analytic platforms still
haven’t quite figured out how to apply metrics in a way that allows marketers
to easily monitor online engagement. In an age where every keystroke, click, scroll,
and hover can be tracked, how could it be that we can’t measure when someone is
engaged with our website? The SAG Awards were streamed online, but were viewers
getting inspired by the fashion the stars chose to wear on that special night
or were they looking at their smartphone? You will find some Web analytics
solutions touting engagement metrics, but when you actually use these metrics
with the purpose of discovering an engagement level, you’ll find yourself more
confused than ever.
Let’s look at three metrics commonly mistaken to measure
engagement: Time on Site, Repeat Visits, and Pages Per Visit.
What does the amount of time someone spent on your site tell
you? Could it be that visitors are enthralled with your content and just don’t
want to leave? Possibly. Could it be that a visitor is having trouble filling
out your online form? Possibly. So, which is it? You’ve got someone who has
spent five minutes on your site. Were they engaged? If you’re measuring Time on
Site, call it Time on Site and not Engagement (Kaushik, 2010)! You can’t
conclude if your website is engaging by analyzing this metric, alone.
Repeat visits isn’t necessarily the signal flare for
engagement. Unless you know why people are visiting your site within a specific
time period, then you can’t tell if they are engaged.
Pages per visit may look enticing and you want to believe
that it’s a strong indicator of positive engagement, but the truth is you still
can’t differentiate between someone frustrated looking for information they
just can’t find and someone who just can’t get enough of the goodness your site
is offering.
These metrics each give us a
better understanding of how a user is engaging with our website -- yet none of
them hold the key. In order to use data to measure engagement, you have to get
creative with what you're measuring (Rawski, 2012).
There are two fundamental terms that drastically clears up
the issues of measuring online engagement—degree and kind.
My friend Theo Papadakis shared this brilliant insight with
me: quantitative data (web analytics) is limited in that it can measure the degree of Engagement but not the kind of Engagement (Kaushik, 2010). How good is that? Really good!
Degree is the level of involvement and kind is positive or
negative engagement. So, if Web analytics can measure degree, how can we
determine the kind of engagement? In addition to offering visitors engaging
content, giving people control over the content they consume on your site is a
giant leap towards measuring engagement.
Measuring interaction is the key and with this information,
the three metrics above will finally have the opportunity to tell you the story
you’ve been longing to hear. , Interaction could be number of downloads,
shares, or video views. You get the idea. This type of activity isn’t captured
in Web analytics tools, but by using other resources to track action you’ll be
in a pretty strong position to talk to company leaders about the engagement
level of the company website.
There are several ways you could go about measuring
interaction using various resources, but if you have the opportunity to develop
widgets that can be integrated into your website and then measured, then you’re
lucky. Think of widgets as containers. A widget could contain a single video
and a few social sharing buttons. By measuring the actions that take place on
the widget, you’ll be well on your way to engagement and you’ll have a much
better picture of the content that is driving engagement.
Let’s take Time on Site again, and look at the time spent on
a Web page that contains a few different widgets. Taking the metrics from the
widgets and combining with the Time on Site metric, you’ll be pretty accurate
in determining if someone has walked away to grab a drink or if they’re digging
your site. You’ll also be able to better guess the kind of engagement. If you
see unexplainable high activity on a particular widget, maybe there’s a
problem.
References:
Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0:
The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity.
Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing. ISBN# 978-0470529393
Rawski, N. (2012, June 15). How to really measure
engagement. Retrieved on January 28, 2013, from, http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_full.aspx?id=32065
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