Web Analytics Community starts the Engagement Attribute, adding some thoughts.
Our roundtable discussion earlier this week indicated a high need to understand enagement.
Working Definition of Engagement:
Engaged in the context of social measurement is a way of looking at depth of interest. In regards to social mediums, mesauring interaction, both qualitative and quantitiatve makes sense.
Engagement came up as the number one item.
Industry Challenges defining the attributes of Engagement
Clint Ivy left a comment to check out a conversation that he and Eric were having on how to measure Enagement. I know this is going to start getting interesting as I emailed some of my Web Analytics folks to get involved in this conversation. Clint is annoyed with Scoble’s thoughts on enagement, which I agree with, that’s just one attribute to measure out of dozens. See Scoble’s video on it here.
A need to understand Engagement
In regards to social mediums, mesauring interaction, both qualitative and quantitiatve makes sense. Engagement came up as the number one item. left a to check out a conversation that he and Eric were having on how to measure Enagement. I know this is going to start getting interesting as I emailed some of my Web Analytics folks to get involved in this conversation. Clint on enagement, which I agree with, that’s just one attribute to measure out of dozens. See .I believe that Web activity is the baseline of measurement, but to measure social media, there are so many other attributes to measure. It doesn’t tell us “What” the user thought, or how it spread. We can learn from some of their best practices, and apply to this new study area. There are other conversations about Enagement focused on media, politics and influence by Sebastian.
Eric’s five attributes for measuring Engagement
From his recent blog post
1) The visitor views “critical” content on the web site
2) The visitor has returned to the web site recently
3) The visitor returns directly to the web site some of the time
4) Some high percentage of the visitor’s sessions are “long” sessions
5) If available, the visitor is subscribed to at least one available site feed
Cool, great start here’s a few more from me:
6) Did they interact with the site? leave a comment, rate something?
7) What did they say?
Did they link to the site, tag, or tell others using social media tools?
9) What does their web activity indicate they’ve done?
In addition to being on the site for a long time, did they interact with it?
I leave browser windows open for days and don’t look at them, does this mean I’m engaged?
I knew reaching to the Web Analytics community would yield a good starting point, now to bulid the ‘human’ parts to it.
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Jeremiah, specifically to your comment “I leave my browser windows open for days and don’t look at them, does this mean I’m engaged?”
Even traditional web analytics packages will time out your session (visit and thus visit length) after a 1/2 hour of activity, so the answer is ’sort of’ but web analysis tries to mitigate that issue.
We often see the problem from the other side, where while the user might be engaged (watching a video or playing a game) but the browser looks inactive because it is not making any server requests.
[…] Web Analytics Community starts the Engagement Attribute, adding some thoughts.: “ […]
I can tell you the default setting on IIS session timeout is 20 min.
Many web applications are extending their session timeout much longer than what it used to be. So this shouldn’t be the problem.
If user is streaming video, it is using server bandwidth. It is not “inactive”.
Jim Nail has listed 4 Types of Engagement and describes the situation where no one seems to be able to clearly define the measurement of engagement.
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/11633.asp
“What was clear is that the industry is very unclear about engagement– at least the direction that the MI4 task force of the ARF, AAAA, and the Association of National Advertisers are going.”
“official working definition:
Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.”
I couldn’t find the definition of engagement on http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/. I guess you have to buy his book to find out what he used to define and measure his own definition of “engagement”.
[…] I emailed and got the Web Analytics community involved with this conversation too…interesting, we’ve three angels now: Social Media Industry, Advertising Industry, and Web Analytics Industry. […]
Hey Jeremiah, just wanted to make sure that you’re still paying attention…we’ve been having a relatively lively (for analysts) discussion over on Eric T. Peterson’s Blog about Engagement…
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2006/12/how-do-you-calculate-engagement-part-i.html?vs_b=Web%20Analytics%20Demystified&vs_p=How%20do%20you%20calculate%20engagement%3F%20Part%20I&vs_k=1
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2006/12/frank-faubert-writes-in.html?vs_b=Web%20Analytics%20Demystified&vs_p=Frank%20Faubert%20writes%20in%20…&vs_k=1
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2006/12/how-do-you-calculate-engagement-part-ii.html?vs_b=Web%20Analytics%20Demystified&vs_p=How%20do%20you%20calculate%20engagement%3F%20Part%20II&vs_k=1
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2007/01/calculating-engagement-part-iii-social.html?vs_b=Web%20Analytics%20Demystified&vs_p=Calculating%20engagement%2C%20part%20III%20…%20social%20engagement%20and%20relative%20content%20grouping&vs_k=1
Not to mention Eric has started a Google Group on measuring this whole ‘Web 2.0′ thingy…
Happy CES’ing
Thanks, I’ve already read most of these, Yes I’ve been paying attention
[…] I find Eric’s activities (part two, and three) (Update Feb 12th: and now part four) taking on the actual measurement insightful and fascinating, this spurred from the challenge my colleague Robert Scoble requested of the industry to define and calculate engagement metrics. I’m kind of the middle of this thing, as I also have been communicating with Clint Ivy, and Daniela of Factiva, it’s a fun party I can assure you. […]