Measuring Engagement: Quality over Quantity
I read this on emarketer.com today:
“Marketers are looking closely at measures of engagement. Respondents considered time spent on a site to be the most important performance metric, followed by Unique Page Views.”
From this chart, we see that Senior Marketers deem Time on Site the most important metric to determine Engagement. At first this seems intuitive, if someone stays around your site, they must be Engaged, but that’s not the complete story. Engagement is qualitative, while Time Spent on Site is quantitative. (Credit to this post by Avinash Kaushik for the inspiration).
For example, I recently was interested in determining the number of active iPhone users in the United States. Initially, my google search led me to AdMob, where I spent 16 minutes on their blog trying to find my desired information. I didn’t find it and left the site.
Next, I went on Wikipedia and quickly found the answer to my query within 2 minutes.
From the information on emarketer, it seeems that most Senior Officals see this:
- Time on Site: AdMob = 16 minutes
- Time on Site: Wikipedia = 2 minutes
- Time on AdMob was greater than Time on Wikipedia.
- Therefore, there was greater engagement with AdMob.
This is false. I had a high engagement on Wikipedia becuase I found what I was looking for, and low engagement on AdMob because I shifted through irrelevant data then left.
We can see then, that engagement (qualitative) cannot be completely explained through time on site (quantitative).
The question is begged then, how can we measure Engagement. There are a number of ways this can be done, many of them outlined in Web Analytics 2.0.
- Exit Surveys: When users leave your site, hit them with a quick survey using 4Q asking them about the quality of their visit. Keep it short and use this data combine with time on site to determine how engaged your visitor was.
- Email Surveys: If someone joined your mailing list, shoot them an email asking about their experience with the site.
- Phone Calls: Seems old-fashioned, but if they gave you their number, use it. Conduct a quick survey asking how the site visit went, what could be improved, and what was good.
- User Testing: A number of sites exist, like usertesting.com that allow you view video and hear feedback about how your site is working. For a fairly nominal fee, you can get great information on user engagement.
Armed with these tactics you can help senior marketers understand how to effectively gauge engagement and make your site more able to achieve its goals.
