I was just reading Jeneane Sessum’s post about the latest Ze Frank/Rocketboom dustup and she’s right, we need to measure stuff other than just whether a download got completed or not. She says we need a “likeability” stat. I think it goes further than that.
There’s another stat out there called “engagement.” No one is measuring it that I know of.
What do I mean?
Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see.
Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.
So, why should engagement matter to an advertiser?
Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale.
Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.
My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today, but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention.
How could we measure audience engagement?
Is this something that Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab could do? If he could, that’d be a valuable company that advertisers would die to buy stuff from.
Greetings,
Actually, I have found Hitslinkt to be a useful tool. Your post in part inspired me to write this one for my blog.
I am happy this discussion is unfolding on this side of the World, rather than in the Marketing / Advertising side. Generally, it’s the reverse.
Greetings,
Actually, I have found Hitslinkt to be a useful tool. Your post in part inspired me to write this one for my blog.
I am happy this discussion is unfolding on this side of the World, rather than in the Marketing / Advertising side. Generally, it’s the reverse.
[...] – Share what you learn with colleagues and network with people in other organisations who sit in seats like yours to identify new ways to calculate the benefits, costs and risks of blogging. Work with them to create a framework for measuring the ROI of your blogging efforts. Join the search for a new metric for engagement. [...]
[...] “How do you measure engagement” on Robert Scoble’s blog: “I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. (…) Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.” [...]
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[...] Scoble asked for some new KPIs around engagement, which just drives me nuts because engagement is not a new topic and not limited to “Web 2.0” – we’ve all (probably) been working on engagement a long time and there are KPIs available – I guess either they’re not special enough or “Web 2.0ers” don’t pay attention to web analytics *sigh*. [...]
[...] Scobleizer – New audience metric needed: engagement： Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see. [...]
[...] Robert Scoble has talked about this effect in the past, comparing the traffic he gets from Digg.com to mainstream media sites like USA Today. Digg generates far more traffic than MSM. [...]
[...] It seems like forever ago that Eric and I talked about engagement and how I expressed some frustration over Scoble’s post about the need for Engagement metrics. Haven’t we web analysts been talking about this like FOREVER (well maybe 18 months or so anyway). [...]
[...] Some experts even think we should find ways to measure engagement. Tech Evangelist Robert Scoble explains why: As an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale. [...]
I wrote about this recently here. BuzzLogic sent a note after reading it, that they have built a complete suite that measures engagement and conversations.
I wrote about this recently here. BuzzLogic sent a note after reading it, that they have built a complete suite that measures engagement and conversations.
[...] site provides. The 95+% of people who don’t convert must be doing something useful! There has been a good conversation about measuring “engagement” recently. Eric Peterson outlined [...]
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Hi! Very nice site! Thanks you very much! d0xsWxt2KW
[...] Analytics Demystified has been running a series of articles on Engagement Metrics, as a response to Robert Scoble’s calling for “engagement metrics.” Based on discussions he has had with customers on building engagement metrics, Eric has outlined a [...]
[...] so much (enough to blog about it) is because time spent viewing a site is a far better metric for engagement than pageviews. I don’t know how accurately Compete can measure viewing time (in other words, [...]
[...] But engagement was a key theme explored at the Future of Information Summit ‘07 presented by Experian recently. Last month, a Factiva roundtable reached to figure out how to measure social media the best way, and Robert Scoble (no less) had already added his call for a new metric for engagement. [...]
[...] and more, our clients and readers have asked us to develop a better metric for measuring the performance of their web channels and [...]
[...] friend Clint Ivy and I were talking awhile back and he asked me, “So what do you think about Scoble’s call for an engagement metric?” I said, “Huh?” since I had long since stopped reading Robert Scoble, but [...]
Is the difficulty of measuring engagement inherent to the browser or the browser-based way we engage on the internet? It seems users need to be empowered in some way to measure their own level of engagement – but it needs to happen on the client side because so much of it is opaque to the server.
Is the difficulty of measuring engagement inherent to the browser or the browser-based way we engage on the internet? It seems users need to be empowered in some way to measure their own level of engagement – but it needs to happen on the client side because so much of it is opaque to the server.
[...] it is talked about a bunch of lost ad impressions on variety of online locations, in order to have achieved ad campaign results, Web site owners with [...]
[...] makes me think so. Though searching for the word turns up over 85 million results, there was a lone result on the first page that didn’t try to push a ring or wedding planning on me, it took me to page 9 [...]
[...] (Robert Scoble, the ex-Microsoft “evangelist”) from 2006 entitled: New audience metrics needed: Engagement, lists, what engagement is about and what might be [...]
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