Measuring marketing engagement
Measuring marketing engagement is not an exact science as Simon van Wyk finds out.
It all used to be so easy. In the early days of web analytics everything was focused on impressions, click-throughs, and conversion rates.
However, with an increased marketing spend online comes increased expectations of measurement and tracking. Marketers are looking for different ways to measure the success of their digital marketing spend.
Of course any campaign, whether on or offline should be measured by whether it meets its objectives. And those objectives are trending towards engagement.
After all, when people are truly engaged with your brand, it’s highly likely they will be loyal customers too. And to get them highly engaged, you need to create valuable content and tools that your customers need or want to interact with, when they want to interact with it, 24×7. Of course this means channelling marketing budgets into valuable content development and not short media bursts of activity.
Measuring engagement is not an exact science as Simon van Wyk finds out
It all used to be so easy. In the early days of web analytics everything was focused on impressions, click-throughs, and conversion rates.
However, with an increased marketing spend online comes increased expectations of measurement and tracking. Marketers are looking for different ways to measure the success of their digital marketing spend.
Of course any campaign, whether on or offline should be measured by whether its objectives were met. And those objectives are trending towards engagement.
After all, when people are truly engaged with your brand, it’s highly likely they will be loyal customers too. And to get them highly engaged, you need to create valuable content and tools that your customers need or want to interact with, when they want to interact with it, 24×7. Of course this means channelling marketing budgets into valuable content development and not short media bursts of activity.
Marketers of course are finding it challenging to switch from tried and tested mass media formulae and move into a playing field that is anything but formulaic. One size definitely does not fit all.
Engagement means different things to different people
So while engagement is the new holy grail and there’s no question of the benefits customer engagement can bring to the brand, how you actually measure it is another entirely different matter. Indeed there’s no one agreed way to define, measure, and extract value from online engagement.
Of course there are more analytics and metrics online than most people care to think about let alone know what to do with.
Basic operational measures such as click-throughs and conventional web analytics metrics like recency, frequency and depth of visit which have been used extensively are not sufficient to measure overall customer engagement.
With Flash and AJAX delivering richer and more dynamic experiences without the user having to reload an entire page, looking at how many pages our visitors take on a journey through our site usually tells us little more than they couldn’t find what they were looking for. And although total minutes is being used as the most accurate way to compare sites, the time spent on site also does not reflect whether the experience was good or not. Standard measurements alone don’t give us enough information to form an accurate picture of customer engagement.
Engagement is a measure of consumer involvement with a brand and is both a marketing tactic and a metric. But engagement means different things to different people.
Engagement reaches before and beyond purchases of products and services - it relates to all the interactions that a customer has in relation to a brand like visiting the website, subscribing to an email newsletter or rss feed, downloading a podcast, commenting on a blog or writing a product review.
So whilst a single metric for engagement is impossible, it’s important to look at the different elements that make up engagement.
Marketing’s New Key Metric
Last year Forrester Research published a report called “Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement” in which the research company framed engagement as the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time.
The report says: “Engagement goes beyond reach and frequency to measure people’s real feelings about brands. It starts with their own brand relationship and continues as they extend that relationship to other customers. As a customer’s participation with a brand deepens from site use and purchases (involvement and interaction) to affinity and championing (intimacy and influence), measuring and acting on engagement becomes more critical to understanding customers’ intentions. The four parts of engagement build on each other to make a holistic picture.”
Thus Forrester proposed engagement should be measured by four key components:
>>Involvement: KPIs including site visitors, time spent, page views
>>Interaction: the volume of contributions to blogs, UGC, reviews
>>Intimacy: survey-based measures of consumer attitudes, perception and feeling about the brand
>>Influence: the weight of the consumer, how likely they are to recommend the brand or be advocates
Value from actions
It’s clear that engagement gives you a deeper understanding of your customers’ actions. Importantly, it recognises that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others.
And these actions can take place on and offline. On your website and of course on third party sites, social networks and blogs where your customers choose to engage with your brand. Engagement needs to be measured beyond the constraints of the website or a particular ad. And it needs to be measured in the context of a company’s marketing objectives.
As outlined in Forrester’s Measuring Customer Engagement series: “Measuring engagement is no simple task: It requires a cross-channel, data-intensive approach that strains today’s measurement processes and the underlying technology that supports them.”
Clearly measuring engagement is not simple. But brand engagement is critical, and those brands who successfully get their customers to engage with them will be the big winners of the 21st Century.
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