clearly offering potentially bet-
ter measures of engagement,
some of these have an obvious
downside for those of us who
are more concerned about inap-
propriate monitoring of our
activities.
May + June 2010
that could be called “excitable
expansionism.” Whenever I hear
someone say “Yes, and we could
do this as well!”, I cringe and try
to drive the conversation back
to the core issue we believe we
are addressing—the core goal,
need, or hedonistic channel we
believe the product should exist
to serve.
Engagement cannot be a one-size-fits-all calculation. It varies
according to industry, organization, business goals, and so
on. Along with this tailoring,
one needs to be clear that the
relative weighting you give any
action depends on your goal.
Your metrics and measurement
research program depend on
whether you are assessing a
feature, an application, a site,
or a business/brand; whether
you are assessing the value of
the product in itself for a single
user or as a broker between
social entities. There are (single)
user-engagement measures, but
these may not be the same as
those that are appropriate for
social media. A useful single-user metric might be clicks and
content (i.e., how many features
are clicked on, how much information and content is uploaded),
but a useful measure for social
applications may be reciprocity
between the people using the
application (i.e., how many links
do you send me in response
to what I send you—how conversational is the application,
and how much sharing does it
encourage?)
Problems with internet
Engagement measurement
The artful combination of measures with a clear view of what
one is trying to achieve is key.
Avinash Kaushik, an analytics practitioner and author of
Web Analytics 2.0, calls for good
design practice around Web
analytics on the issue of engagement. His steps are:
1. Define why your website/
application exists, asking, “If
there were one thing your web-
site would do, what would that
one thing be?”
2. Determine the critical
metrics (three or fewer) that
will identify exactly how you
can measure if your website is
successful at delivering against
its purpose.
3. Decide what engagement
means to you in your context.
4. Don’t call that metric
“engagement.”
He urges us to call a spade
a spade, saying, “Think very
carefully about what you are
measuring if you do measure
engagement. If engagement to
you is repeat visitors by visi-
tors then call it Visit Frequency,
don’t call it engagement.” It is
crucial to determine ahead of
time what your goals are and
what constitutes success. This
is akin to working on a product
and being clear as to what the
primary goal of the product is.
So many great ideas and great
products are hampered by a
version of “creeping featurism”
a broader yet still measurable
notion of Engagement
I would like to broaden the idea
of engagement still further.
Taking my cue from media
studies I note there have been
many scales and measures
of engagement, most of them
developed for TV viewing.
Examples include Q Scores from
Marketing Evaluations that
measured “likeability,” launched
in 1963, and Jack Myers’s
Emotional Connections model
of viewer engagement, launched
in 1999. Since then scales have
measured relevance, affinity,
comfort and resonance, impres-
sion, opinions, recall, aware-
ness of brands and products,
memory for program details,
emotional involvement, and,
of course, moment-by-moment
measurements of physiological
and neurological effects. Most of
these studies are with represen-
tative panels of people sampled
from the population of viewers
as a whole.
