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?
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