December
21
2006
Yep, that’s short-hand for Eric Talks Engagement. Eric gets one step closer to brass tacks by defining the activities that occur on his site, or with his content that are relevant and engaged – for him.
Here’s his list of activities, grouped into moderate engagement and high engagement sets (as defined by Eric):
Moderate-Value Activities
- Read my weblog
- Read about the Web Analytics Business Process
- Research web analytics jobs
- Add a link to my link database
- Read comments about my books
- Give me an email address
- Host a Web Analytics Wednesday
- Join the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group
High-Value Activities
- Consider buying one or more of my books
- Buy one or more of my books
- Read about any of my books
- Read about my Key Performance Indicator Worksheets
- Download a sample copy of one of my books
- Email me directly
- Submit a comment to my weblog
- Go to Amazon.com to check out my books
Now, score one for Eric for actually thinking through a framework for measuring engagement, and putting it into practice, but it’s late and I’m feeling nit-picky.
Because Engagement has been talked about so much lately in terms of Web 2.0 and ‘Social Media‘ I’m putting Eric’s listed activities through that lense. Of the 16 activities, only 5 measure social media engagement:
- Read my weblog
- Add a link to my link database
- Host a Web Analytics Wednesday
- Join the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group
- Submit a comment to my weblog
7 seem to be about commerce – dealing with buying Eric’s books
- Consider buying one or more of my books
- Buy one or more of my books
- Read about any of my books
- Read about my Key Performance Indicator Worksheets
- Download a sample copy of one of my books
- Go to Amazon.com to check out my books
- Read comments about my books
Two of them I would equate to traditional CRM efforts
- Give me an email address
- Email me directly
The last two I’m having a hard time categorizing, but my guess is they relate directly to the Eric T. Peterson brand
- Research Web Analytics Jobs
- Read about the Web Analytics Business Process
So, here’s the breakdown:
- Social Media Activities: 31.25%
- Commerce Activities: 43.75%
- CRM Activities: 12.5%
- Other (Brand) Activities: 12.5%
Ok, so Eric’s in a bit of a hybrid situation, which ‘traditional’ (web 1.0?) companies will also find themselves in where social media is just one of many things going on.
But the blogger in me says ‘Come On! Only five of the activities are related to the social aspect of the site AND only one of those five is of high engagement value?’
Eric you gotta get out of your traditional corporate shell! (Disclaimer: I’m a traditional corporate dog too)
Where are the subscriptions to your RSS feed and the associated click-backs?
Where are the track backs?
Where are the buzz-rankings (e.g. post/discussions picked up in other places)?
Let me put this another way, is engagement a practical measure for non-social web activities?
Hi Clint,
Is engagement really only about “Social Media”?
Eric defines Engagement as follows:
“Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals.”
If Engagement is something that should only be focused on Social Media how would you re-define it?
Doesn’t buying a product from the site illustrate greater engagement with the goals of the site in offering that product for sale?
I actually look at “Engagement” as more than a single metric but a class of metrics that are a qualitative application of a scale against quantitative metrics to measure performance towards reaching business goals relating to the value of visitor interaction with the business. Engagement in my opinion should measure (as best it can) the level of quality (higher value) interactions with the business whether that interacting happen on the site, off the site or cross channel.
Take the purchasing of books from Eric’s site for example. A user can purchase as many copies of his books as he/she wants and one of Eric’s goals is certainly to sell more books but is the purchase of 2 copies of Web Site Measurement Hacks illustrate more engagement with the content on the part of the User. (You could argue yes her but lets not for simplicity). Eric has 3 books for user to purchase and read so lets say that his goal is that every Visitor to his site buy all three of his books at least once.
So lets set this to a scale by visitor segments:
Segment 1 (S1) = Users who bought 0 books
Segment 2 (S2) = Users who bought 1 book
Segment 3 (S3) = Users who bought 2 books (no duplicate titles)
Segment 4 (S4) = Users who bought all three titles.
Formula:
Visitor Purchase Engagement = (((S1 * 1) + (S2 * 2) + (S3 * 3) + (S4 *4))/Total Users -1)/3 [as a percentage]
0% puchase engagemnet means people aren’t buying books
100% means it is time to order reprints
The more titles you buy the more purchase engagement measured directly against the goal with the understanding that there are only so many distinct book products to buy (or engage in receiving and reading).
The above example is perhaps a bit over simplidfied but the core of how I look at and apply the concept of engagement is there. The way I approach the idea of engagement is to try and break down each business goal to a qualitative scale through segmentation. I then get my overall engagement by averaging all of the goal specific values. It works very nicely trended over time or also for comparison between segments such as the search terms that drive traffic for the site in determining which ones are driving higher value traffic to the site.
-Ian
ian,
thanks for the thoughtful comment. What I wonder most about engagement is are we doing a bit of ‘square-peg/round-hole’ bit. What you describe above sounds an awful lot like what Eric calls visitor conversion rate.
Certainly what you describe is actionable – what happens if I offer a ‘buy 2 get 1 free’ package or a ‘buy 1, get 50% of the second book’ discount’. Those are recognizable ‘knobs’ that I can turn to see what it does to the score.
The questions around this just keep popping in my head – like is ‘engagement’ just a web 2.0 word for something else?
Do we need engagement to measure traditional ‘activities’ (like buying a book) or is it something unique to the social media landscape where we are trying to understand how users consume and interact with that landscape?
[...] Curse Clint Ivy, curse him for being right some of the time! I mean, of course, Clint’s diatribe about my engagement calculation and it’s lack of social (media) value. In his post, Clint gives me credit for at least trying [...]