Are you looking to create more "engagement" between your brand and consumers? You're in good -- if sometimes misguided -- company. Marketers, having recognized the futility of the carpet-bomb-your-way-to-awareness paradigm, are making this the metric du jour. There's only one problem: Engagement, by itself, isn't really a useful measure of success online. It's more of a side effect, a phenomenon that has little or nothing to do with the type of highly specific business goals needed to drive a successful digital project.

Most people define engagement as time on site, page views per visit or number of clicks. In other words, it's the new way of counting users -- the more sensitive version of the term "hit." All this sounds useful enough on the surface. But in practice, chasing engagement tends to be a way to avoid discussing whether or not users are achieving specific, real-life goals on your site. It's too broad a measure to hold anyone accountable.

From a planning perspective -- even if the primary goal is simply to build awareness -- it's best to assume that every user visits for a specific, practical reason. In other words, real human beings rarely invest their time "engaging" with brands, whatever that means, so you may want to ban the word from your project briefs. What should you replace it with? Try a narrow set of goals, for example, number of questions answered, problems solved, products researched, or RSS feed sign-ups. Then, focus on the real-life user tasks your product needs to support in order to achieve those goals.

Let's look at an example of how the success of a digital project can have nothing to do with engagement. A major retailer, among the three most visited sites in its category, wanted to make it easier to find products on its Web site. A long series of enhancements were made to navigation, search and other finding methods. Two outcomes were clear immediately after launch. First, users were indeed finding products faster, putting more items in their carts and converting more often. Mission accomplished? Well, another effect of the changes was that users were looking at fewer pages and spending less time on the site. They just didn't need to invest as many clicks as they had before in order to accomplish the same goals. In other words, "engagement" decreased-and everyone was happier. The real measures of success were findability and incremental revenue, but not engagement.

Content sites are another example of where engagement can be a dysfunctional metric. Persuading people to stay longer on a content site, of course, is not necessarily correlated with more revenue-especially if the people in question are clicking through the 57th image of a celebrity photo slide show. It's unlikely the site can sell out that kind of ad inventory, so the additional "engagement" is, if anything, just increasing costs.
 
True, not every client organization is prepared to celebrate outcomes that involve lower engagement. That's understandable. Marketers instinctively want massive reach so engagement sounds good. How many millions of visitors did we get? How many friends does our Facebook page have?


 
Another reason the term has become so prevalent, I suspect, is because it puts a newer and more interactive-sounding spin on "humans sitting passively and watching our delicious branded messages." In other words, it allows marketers to postpone thinking about that long list of far more common but less glamorous user goals -- classics like, "I need to know whether this refrigerator is going to last" or "Just show me directions to your store" -- and gives them something more palatable, a term that can encompass stand-alone campaign sites, Flash wastelands and whatever other digital pranks some people still can't stop themselves from dreaming up.

Regardless of your role in a digital project, here are seven nice things that can happen to you if you replace engagement with more specific measures of success:

1. Your design work will become better and more focused. It will be driven by a consciously chosen list of business and user goals like higher sales, lower costs, higher perceived value, more loyalty.

2. You'll get the credit and bigger budgets you deserve because your efforts will be directly tied to the specific value you created.

3. You'll start paying less attention to undeniably interesting, but less actionable, global measures, such as the overall number of visitors to your Web site. You'll focus on meaningful outcomes in targeted areas, such as newsletter sign-ups.

4. You'll be more able to hold your teams accountable. You may even have shorter meetings.

5. You'll find it much easier to test and optimize. You can't even have a conversation about optimization until everyone agrees on a small number of focused goals.

6. You'll find it much, much easier to roll out new Web sites and products. You'll be able to focus on getting one feature right at a time, launching a simple but credible user experience, hitting one goal, and building from there -- which, after all, is how most successful digital products are born.

7. You'll start to sound less like a media planner and more like a software designer. Well maybe that's more weird than nice. You decide.

Gene Liebel is partner, user experience at Huge.