Oct 9th, 2007
Oct 9th, 2007
The buzz in web analytics circles lately is the idea of being able to accurately measure a website visitor’s “engagement” with a website. What is really meant by the term engagement anyway?
For one thing, it doesn’t seem like anyone can agree on what a standard definition of engagement is and unless you can clearly define what you mean by this new metric, how can you possibly begin to describe how to measure it?
Might I suggest we stick to these basics:
1) Define why your website exists. Not in a five hundred word essay but a single sentence if possible.
2) If you did a good job with #1, that statement contains the critical metrics (three or less) that will identify exactly how you can measure if your website is successful at delivering against its purpose.
3) One of your critical metrics might be what your senior management calls “engagement”. Work hard to identify exactly what that metric means.
4) Once you’ve identified it, don’t call that metric engagement. Call it by it’s real name. For example, if you define engagement as the number of page views divided by unique visitors, then call the metric page views per visitor. At least you will be clear on what you are measuring and it will probably spark some good debate as to why that’s not a very good definition for engagement.
Start the discussion in your own organization about what constitutes website visitor engagement. It will be enlightening.
I’m working on an engagement metrics now as i’ve read your post. this is quite helpful. I’m asked to do navigational analysis of the site’s home page. The requirement is to re-design it. I’ve got the stats that is the hit count from Google analytics but i’m really looking forward on how to analyze the nature of users.
Of course they can’t be precise numbers but still would give me a trend. could you describe how trend analysis can be done with the given data.
Pls comment.