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Measuring Engagement

Three Approaches to
Measuring Customer Engagement
Whether it's engagement with your blog, your brand, or as the result of a relationship, there are ways to measure it.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

(For more on engagement, see Jenny Schade's recent article, "Seven Steps to Ignite Employee Engagement: How to overcome data doom and gloom.")

There's been a lot of talk of late about measuring customer engagement, most of which is music to my ears. The less we focus on HITS (How Idiots Track Success) and the more we focus on the customer, the better we can all do our jobs.

In answer to the question, "Why measure engagement?" I've been quoting my father (Ralph Delahaye Paine) a lot of late. In the 1960's he told a group of advertising executives:

If we can put a man in orbit, why can't we determine the effectiveness of our communications? The reason is simple and perhaps, therefore, a little old-fashioned: People, human beings with a wide range of choice. Unpredictable, cantankerous, capricious, motivated by innumerable conflicting interests, and conflicting desires.

And, while we've come up with lots of good ways to measure what human beings read, we're not so good at tracking their innumerable conflicting interests and conflicting desires. To me, if we can measure engagement, we will have (pardon me for stretching this analogy too far) gone far beyond sending a man into "orbit," and taken a giant leap for marketing man- (and woman-) kind.

Measuring engagement necessitates following the actions and desires of the customer. It doesn't matter what media he or she consumes, it matters what they do with the information once they've gotten it.

Measuring Engagement on the Web

If it's a blog you are measuring, determine first what it is that visitors do that is important. Do they come back to it again and again? Do they comment, do they link to it? Do they come to it of their own accord, by typing in the URL directly? Or are they searching for something and happen to find you? Do they read it on a regular basis? Do they subscribe? Do they tell their friends about it? All of these are measures of their level of engagement.

If you want specific metrics for blogs or websites, here the ones that Eric Peterson recommended at his presentation at eMetrics. Note that he uses a sum of measures similar to these to derive an engagement score. (See also his blog on this.)

1. Percent increase or decrease in unique visits

2. Change in page rank, i.e., a list of the top ten most popular areas and how it has changed in the last week

3. How many sessions represent more than five page views?

4. In the past month, what percent of all sessions represent more than five page views?

5. Percent of sessions that are greater than five minutes in duration

6. Percent of visitors that come back for more than five sessions

7. Percent of sessions that arrive at your site from a Google search, or a direct link from your website or other site that is related to your brand

8. Percent of visitors that become subscribers

9. Percent of visitors that download something from the site

10. Percent of visitors that provide an email address

Measuring Engagement with Your Brand

If what you're trying to measure is engagement with your brand in social media as a whole, it's a bit more complex, but not all that difficult. The folks at Forrester just produced a white paper that outlines their definition of engagement. Their definition of engagement:

Engagement is the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time.

They distinguish four components of engagement:

Involvement—Includes web analytics like site traffic, page views, time spent, etc. This is the component that measures if a person is present.

Interaction—This component addresses the more robust actions people take, such as buying a product, requesting a catalog, signing up for an email, posting a comment on a blog, uploading a photo or video, etc. These metrics come from e-commerce or social media platforms.

Intimacy—The sentiment or affinity that a person exhibits in the things they say or the actions they take, such as the meaning behind a blog post or comment, a product review, etc. Services such as brand monitoring help track these types of conversations.

Influence—Addresses the likelihood that a person will recommend your product or service to someone else. It can manifest itself through brand loyalty or through recommendations to friends, family, or acquaintances. These metrics mostly come from surveys (both qualitative and quantitative).

I think the key element of Forrester's approach is their willingness to mix the quantitative data, like web analytics, with the human element, such as sentiment and intimacy.

Engagement Is the Result of a Relationship

But I would add a fifth level of engagement measurement and that would be based on relationships. At some point, you just need to come right out and ask your audience:

• Do they trust you?
• Are they committed?
• Do they believe you are committed to them?
• Do they interact with you only out of necessity or a sense of reciprocity? Or are you working together to see the other succeed?

In short, ask them to answer the questions in the Grunig Relationship Instrument. Whether you ask them in person, by phone or in an email doesn't matter. The point is that at some point, if you really want to get a sense of the health of your relationship with them, you are going to need to ask them what they think.

Because, while you can track their behavior with increasing accuracy, all the web metrics in the world may not answer the fundamental question, "Why they do what they do?" Why did they stop coming to your site? Why are they spending less time there? Why are they buying less?

Without a true understanding of the nature of the relationship, you won't be able to do anything to improve the level of engagement. (For more on measuring relationships, see my soon-to-be-published book Measuring Public Relationships, available now as a free download.)

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