I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately on the subject of engagement – how to define it, how to measure it, and lastly how to use it.  The key term here being ‘it’.  Because depending on what ‘it’ is, the method for measuring engagement can and should vary.  The key theme across all of these articles and discussions is how to utilize engagement to improve monetization of content.

There is site engagement, which Nielsen measures as the average amount of time visitors spend on a website.  At the site level, many would argue that engagement is a reflection of time AND activity – how many clicks were there (click depth), did the visitor post a comment, how often does a user come back, or did they perform a desired action. Simply measuring overall time spent can be a misnomer considering poker sites may keep users engaged for hours at a time with virtually no page clicks.  Eric Peterson has done an excellent job of defining site engagement using six normalized metrics that combine all aspects of website interaction, which can be found here.  He defines engagement as: an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals.

Another aspect of engagement is campaign engagement.  As consumer apathy towards banner ads increases, advertisers are increasingly turning to interactive ad units consisting of games, original content, and social features, all of which require new measures – such as how many pass-a-longs, or interactions, did the campaign generate.  Facebook has launched a product called engagement ads and companies like VideoEgg are launching pay per engagement based buys.  Paidcontent.org did a nice piece on some of these emerging models here.  So the ‘it’ in this case is the ad unit and not the website.  Depending on the advertiser’s objective -  sales, clicks, or simply share of mind – applying these various metrics to achieve an overall engagement score is possible for both website and campaign engagement.  As a recent MediaPost article on engagement stated: these metrics ultimately measure consideration and intent, which translate to sales and market share, but they should be measured across all brand related campaigns.

But what about the content or the brand itself IN the content?  If the content isn’t interesting, the website surely won’t be engaging.  And if the website isn’t engaging, I seriously doubt whether engagement based advertisers will want to spend their budgets there.  So how do we define if a piece of content is engaging – or rather which content is engaging?  One of the questions I always ask our clients is how well their latest feature piece is doing.   The answer is always in page view stats and the comparison is made against prior feature articles.  The problem with making this comparison is that it is being made in a vacuum.  If Rolling Stones does a lifetime piece on Stevie Wonder and their average engagement level is 121 seconds and 6 posts, is that good?  I can tell you it is because across the 45 music sites where Vertical Acuity directly measures Stevie Wonder content, he gets an average of 72 seconds of engagement which is much higher than the average R&B artist’s 32 seconds (ironically at the time of this post the number one R&B artist was Bobby Brown with 90 seconds – I wonder what he did this time..).   This is shown in the screenshot below.  Shouldn’t that content be worth more to an advertiser knowing that?

Stevie Wonder Average Engagement

As a publisher, wouldn’t you want to feature content about subjects that people find more engaging, and as an advertiser wouldn’t you want your campaign to appear next to subjects you know will get your brand two to three times the average exposure if engagement really is becoming the measure of choice?  At Vertial Acuity, we believe the cornerstone of measuring engagement comes from the content, which drives the website, which drives the advertising.  Our goal is to help our publishers utilize subject level engagement metrics to improve both their content targeting and their advertising revenue.  What are your thoughts on engagement?

Tags: Advertising, Content Targeting, Engagement

Written by: Josh Hofmann