Is Engagement a metric?

I was about to start this post with "Ok, I've talked about engagement before...", but when searching for those posts, I realised that I'd started a post like that before, so I had to come up with something different.  I couldn't, so I decided that I'd just tell you that I was going to start like that as a way of broaching the subject.  Needless to say, you're probably very hoping that I get to the point at some point, so I'll go straight there.  Eric T Peterson recently wrote a white paper on Engagement and in particular a metric that measures visitor engagement.  He then followed that up a couple of weeks later with a follow up on Audience Engagement with some examples included.

Hang on a second, I can hear you saying.  You said a while ago that you couldn't measure engagement - you could only measure things that indicated engagement.  In fact, back in June I argued that Engagement was conversation where I talked about how the user experience was the brand experience and hence engagement was the conversation you were having with the user.  Or the conversation that the user was having with you - it should work both ways.  Eric and Joseph Carrabis in their white paper argue something slightly different.  They use the definition of engagement to come up with the following:

Engagement is the demonstration of Attention via psychomotor activity that serves to focus an individual’s Attention.
Attention is a behavior that demonstrates that specific neural activity is taking place.

Which they've then broken down into a more specific website version of the above quote:

Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals.

But what does that mean?  I think the second one of these two definitions is a bit more meaningful, but I don't know how you could measure it specifically.  How do you measure the depth of visitor interaction on a site and if it is only an estimate what use is it?

Well Eric thinks you can measure it, as proved by the fact that it is against a set of clearly defined goals.  So this is what he's come up with:

   Σ(Ci + Di + Ri + Li + Bi + Fi + Ii)

Which looks a little confusing, but it is nowhere near as confusing as the long version of the formula:

 

What are they saying?  Well basically they are saying that there are seven measures of engagement and they have normalised them all so you can then add them together.  This means that at some point you could get a site with engagement of 7 and that would be perfect, but you could also have a site with engagement 0 and that would be rubbish.

I won't go into too much detail on what each of the seven metrics is and how it is measured (you can read it in the white paper), but the crux of it is that you take the standard metrics we always look at (page views per visit, visit duration, recency and loyalty) and mix them in with some other non standard metrics (Brand awareness, providing feedback or from feedback surveys and your interaction index which are your conversions).

My suggestion is you pick up the whitepaper and try running it for your site.  See what you come up with.  There are a few things that may be a bit difficult to do, but I reckon for your average site, using Google Analytics you could do it.  Here below for example are the page viewed per visit:

 

Here above we have depth of visit.  I think that in the document Eric and Joseph suggest that you take your percentage of visits who viewed more than four pages.  That sounds a bit optimistic for my blog - most people only stay for one page.  I would have said that was similar for most media sites (ok, maybe not most of them, but some of them).  The other metrics that you'll need from Google Analytics are there also.  In fact they are in that one section of the report right there.

I think the most important question here though, is one that was debated on the web analytics forum and on the bottom of Eric's articles.  I like the quote Eric gives in the comments at the bottom of the article:

Engagement and conversion are different measures. I’ll say it again: ENGAGEMENT AND CONVERSION ARE DIFFERENT MEASURES. Same for satisfaction … ENGAGEMENT AND SATISFACTION ARE DIFFERENT MEASURES.

This is something important, I think.  You have your conversions - in the retail world these are the things that give you  money.  These are the most important things on your bottom line.  If you are only concerned with your bottom line, you should be looking at your conversions.

If you are more concerned about whether you are going to get your users to come back, then you really need to be concerned with the Satisfaction of your users.  This Satisfaction works in two ways, remember.  You need the satisfaction of your website users - will they come back, do they like the experience, how happy are they.  You also have your satisfaction of your customers, this is all down to the quality of the product, rather than the website experience.

What I don't understand then, is why in the Engagement metric we are including conversions and satisfaction.  Engagement now is a combination of conversion and satisfaction.

This brings us on to the Audience Engagement metric.  I think that I get this one much more.  This is something that Comscore wants to use, because people are starting to question their metrics (Comscore uses a sample which it then extrapolates to the whole world, read Avinash's great review).  So lets take the bits of the Visitor Engagement metric that we can measure from Comscore and put them into a new metric - Audience Engagement.

So if we're not confident that their data extrapolates that well, how do we get around this problem?  Well we use the information that they do have to come up with an Audience engagement metric.  This doesn't need to be extrapolated, because it doesn't grow with the size of the audience, it just gets more accurate.  This means that Audience engagement is a great measure for those that use Comscore.  It will tell you which websites have users that go deep into the site. 

Is this good for an advertiser that is planning to put adverts on those pages?  Not quite so sure.  Display advertising has long stopped being about click through rates (they are rubbish and not worth it on the whole) and started being about brand advertising.  For your brand is it better that users are seeing more pages on a site and coming back more frequently?  I don't know.  If they are more engaged with the site, they might not notice the ads around the side any more.  So do you want your site more or less engaging?  It's a tough one to call.

Social bookmarking is all about networking

Whilst I was on the way home from playing tennis earlier (I know, it is far too cold to be playing tennis) I thought that I could have named this post 'taking the fun out of social bookmarking', but that wouldn't have sounded very exciting for you to read, so I've given it a bit of a more exciting title.  Essentially what I want to be demonstrating in this post is that social bookmarking sites are a bit more about networking than they are about bookmarking (if you're doing it for a business reason, of course).

For those of you who can't remember, I've written before about how you break into social bookmarking, looking at some basics, I've looked out the business benefits of using social bookmarking, with its traffic that doesn't convert, but does encourage others.  I've also looked at how you can use Hitwise to find your ideal social bookmarking site.  Here I am going to go off on a bit of a tangent and talk about networks and nodes.  It'll make sense in the end, don't you worry about that.  Hopefully.

Wikipedia has a very nice piece on social networking that I think would be useful to look at, although in their sense they are talking generally and not just online social networks.  I don't know the best way of describing this, so I am just going to paraphrase Wikipedia:  Social networks are about nodes and ties:

Here in the diagram each node (blue dot) relates to a person and each tie (the line inbetween) relate to their relationship.  This has been used by anthropologists for years to discover how people interact with each other and evolve.

In terms of social bookmarking sites, they can work in a number of different ways.  All of the sites that we talk about being social bookmarking (digg, slashdot, stumbleupon, delicious, etc) are social bookmarking sites.  Their purpose is for me to bookmark things that I like and then I can come back to them later, or someone else can come across them and decide if they like them or not too.  Mainly though, they are bookmarks for me.

If we are going to talk about how we get the bookmarks lots of traffic, then we need to look at networks.  On their own the bookmarks may hold a nominal linkage value for the page, but if the network of the user is sufficient then they can help drive more traffic and those users may add more links to the bookmark on their networks, blogs, websites, etc, which in turn will increase traffic from those sites and improve the likelihood of the site appearing in search engines.

How do the social networks work - I think this clever little blog (if you'll excuse the religious undertones) will give you a good example.  If you look at how the network of Jesus works, you'll notice that Jesus isn't connected to all the 'nodes' in his network.  This means that if Jesus says something, then the other 'nodes' will find out what he says through their ties with his immediate friends.  In fact, if Jesus only had 12 'friends' then it is possible that if each of those 12 had 12 more friends, then you can get to a network of several thousand really quickly.  In reality, those 'friends' will be shared around the original 12, but that doesn't mean that you can't create a large network really quickly by only having a small number of friends.

With Social bookmarking it doesn't usually work like that.  You have some people with hundreds of friends (see the famous MrBabyMan on Digg) who will have more power than others.  However these large groups of friends may hinder you in other ways - with so many friends you may find it difficult remembering which friends are interested in which topics to be able to get them to vote for your subject.  However being friends with the odd person like this gives you the ability to be able to network with a large group of people really easily.

However if you are friends with a group of people with similar interests (like Jesus was in the previous example), then your friends will share your bookmarks with other people, who will also share it.  This suddenly starts being a social network (like facebook, myspace, et al) where you are befriending people and finding out what they are like.  Whereas in facebook you share photos and myspace you share music, with the traditional social bookmarking sites you share the web pages you are interested in.

The real difficulty in this comes in how you measure the value of your time.  Remember when you first joined facebook and/or myspace?  Initially it was difficult to get friends to join your network, because you didn't really know anyone on there.  However as you got more facebook friends you started discovering the other people you knew and people you knew started adding you as friends and before you knew it there was a boom. 

The trouble with the social bookmarking side is that these 'friends' aren't real friends.  You'll never meet them.  They are random people out there who just happen to be interested in the same thing as you.  Half the time you probably don't even know their real name (think of all those people who know me as 'WhenCanIStop' - ok there probably aren't that many of them, but all the same).  This makes it difficult to start and you'll be wondering, given modest traffic whether it is worthwhile.  I think in this case it is key to keep an eye on your metrics (especially your metrics of success) and focus on your growth.  This will give you an idea how long it will take before it becomes worthwhile (as in shouting from the rooftops of the office at how much money you are making).  It should also give you heart, as although modest to start with, I can see that the benefits will be increasing steadily.

Half a Century of Posts

Seeing as this is blog post number 50 and I'm almost a year in, I thought I might as well give you a nice update on how things are going.  Back in 2007 (October 10th) I posted the first of the posts on this blog (so what if we can't measure conversion conventionally) and I didn't really think that we'd get this far.  But I have, so I think we can all celebrate.  Well I can celebrate, you guys can sit back and have a look at what's been going on with quite a journey.

6 months ago I wrote a couple of pieces on Traffic for Whencanistop and What I do because of my Analytics.  I think that a good place to start for this blog post would be to look back at some of those metrics that I put together in my first post and update them.

Firstly lets look at traffic levels.  Back at the beginning of April, I was amazed that I was getting 253 visits in a month.  The graph below suggests that I wasn't really thinking big time enough:

I September I hit new traffic levels of 493 visits.  That would seem quite impressive if I hadn't picked up loads of traffic in April itself (476 visits).

However we can look at this in a slightly different way - why was April so big in terms of traffic?  Lets do a bit of a comparison:

Ok - well this paints a bit of a different view - the big increase I got in April was because I got a big volume of traffic from a referring website.  In fact, I blogged before on the traffic effects of getting picked up by stumbleupon.

I think there has been a more interesting phenomenon going on with the blog, which I will show you here.  If the increase in traffic hasn't been because I'm getting more referrals, it must be from other sources, so lets first look at search traffic:

This is much more like it - my search traffic volume has gone up significantly and is now contributing a large proportion of my traffic.  Any additional spikes that I get from referring sites are just going to add an extra bit onto the top of my already sizeable search traffic.

Even more than that - my top two landing pages for search people are Omniture's SiteCatalyst HBX and Conversion Funnel Analysis: When, How, What.  I think this is odd because these are two completely diametrically opposite posts - one is a post talking about how Omniture is taking over web analytics and is mainly aimed at Analysts.  The other is about how to use one technique for finding conversions and is primarily aimed at those who are thinking of becoming practitioners or are picking up more online work.

Conveniently I do quite well in search engine rankings for 'conversion funnel' (second page) and 'conversion funnel analysis' (first page).  I'm also doing quite well for 'SiteCatalyst HBX' and 'Omniture SiteCatalyst HBX' (first page for both) although these aren't quite as good as the first two.  HBX is on its way out, so in a couple of months these terms won't be searched for at all.

Also interesting is that I think that my Direct Traffic is going up as well.  This month I've had 30 odd visits and only one post so far and that accounts for about a third of the traffic so far.  This is positive because it is a sign that I am getting more loyal users.

So this leads me to the things that I said I was going to do because of the analysis:

1. Linking to my keywords in the category list on the left hand side - this is something I haven't done and on second thoughts am wondering how useful it is.  Technorati I am sure picks up these tags and uses them.  I tag things correctly usually, so this should be sufficient - I'm unlikely to rank in the top 20 for generic terms
2. Linking to other posts with appropriate Keywords - This is something that I try to be quite hot on - look at the article above, these have lots of nice links in that hopefully users are going to click through on.  My bounce rate has been getting higher, but that might be because I have more traffic from search engines.  This linking I am hoping is also the reason that my search engine traffic is going up.
3. Post more on popular subjects - This is something I have tried to do and I think that occasionally I am more successful.  I mentioned last time that I should post more on Hitwise.  I have done this and with positive results the Hitwise Twitter page for example picked up my post and helped my traffic.
4. Post more frequently - This is something I definitely haven't done, although I started with good intentions (6 posts in April).  In August I only posted once and only July since then has had 4 posts (one a week).

So all in all, I think it has been a positive 12 months.  I'm starting to get more comments, which is really nice - other people adding a bit more to my posts and I'll try to respond to as many as possible.