So keep in mind the following when thinking about engagement:

* Quantitative Web analytics tools can tell a company the degree of engagement with elements on a Web site, but by themselves, they can’t truly measure engagement.
* Companies should use additional qualitative tools like site surveys, and market research to determine whether users had a negative or positive experience on a site.
[...]

So, the set of criteria to define “Qualified Visitor” may be different for each company, but the metric still applies.

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In addition to higher conversion rates, they see greater engagement (I didn’t want to tell them Avinash’s view that engagement isn’t really that great a metric):

Average time spent on site = 4 minutes for Live vs. < 2.5 for Google. In travel, 11% more time is spent on the destination site vs. the rest of the market. [...]

It seems Avinash stirred up a lot of controversy with his post on engagement (see Sunday’s post). In a series of thoughtful commen I want to highlight Gary Angels response, which is leading the pack in terms of clarity among…

Agreed.

So ah…

What is engagement?

Why isn’t that wrote anywhere in this article?

Honestly I stopped reading after I read what I quoted above and still didn’t have a definition.

Due to the Chinese National Day holiday I am little late on this one, but Avinash Kaushik just earned another feather in his guru cap with his post on engagement as a web analytics metric. His main points are: Engagement is…

Just finished reading old posts on Engagement Index on other sites. I could not believe how complex the proposed methodology was, and after applying your filters here how useless it was.

-James.
PS: Good discussion with Steve, my take away was that in the end he made your point about why not to use engagement rather than the other way around. :-)

I still disagree with you but in my view now (As Jim Novo indicated to me a few days ago) it’s purely a semantics thing. I can agree to disagree now that I know we are just discussing terminology.

You’re doing the same thing as we are and don’t disagree on the principles, (indeed in your example it rocked!) except you choose not to group the metrics under any name that had anything to do with engagement.

The way I now understand it, you’re measuring engagement in it’s various forms anyway, you just don’t call it “engagement”.

My point (and hence various responses) is that in your original post you didn’t say that which is why I reacted in the way I did and called the post misleading.

Instead you suggested we use qualitative metrics, which were all good advice if you could afford to do it to measure what I’d call nurturing. Basically using qualitative data (such as surveys) to find out why people don’t engage. I don’t have a problem with that and would also encourage it if the resources are available.

I did get your point about using good engagement as an excuse for poor sales figures. That’s just bad analytics strategy in my opinion not the problem of the metrics name.

All that said, this was a great open debate! ;o)

Cheers
Steve.

It is not sexy but everyone understood what it meant immediately, making it easy for even for someone who knew nothing about web / web analytics in the company to find insights in the trends.

Thanks so much for the comment,

Avinash.

I had to use some term to clarify which segment I was talking about as we were using a bunch of different segments. I used something the client could easily understand and say rather than the precise web analytics term “the segmented visitors who’ve been on the site for more than 3 minutes” in every conversation.

I would argue that in your example instant engagement was a good name to differentiate your segment from others. So what terminology did you use instead of Instant engagement?

Here a example from a post on May 2006 that used time to segment and highlight valuable sources and measure trends:

Satama is using 3 mins or more and in this example it used five seconds or more. If I translate it into consultant speak, since I am one, it was to capture “instant engagement”, though that word was not used (and now you know why! :)).

Let me once again express my deep appreciation to you for engaging in a open minded discussion sans hidden agendas. I am very grateful for it.

-Avinash.