What do we mean by Engagement and is it all that useful?

It was a mistake. I didn’t mean it to happen but the word just popped out of my mouth. I knew as soon as I said it that there was going to be trouble. Sure enough there was. I was presenting at the recent Emetrics conference in Stockholm and I had just used the dreaded “E” word. You know the one – “Engagement”. As I said, I hadn’t meant to use it but it just sort of happened and, as sure as night follows day, a gentleman in the audience asked me “What do you mean by engagement and how do you measure it?” I stood there like a rabbit in headlights, heart racing and palms sweating because this was a question I had been seriously, seriously, trying to avoid. I started mumbling and then waffling, hoping that inspiration would hit me; that I would have some type of “road to Damascus” experience when all would be revealed… but of course I didn’t and it wasn’t. In the end I smiled sweetly and admitted the horrible truth - “I don’t know”.

In fact, that’s not quite true. I know what engagement is (everyone does) but I don’t know what it means or how to explain it, let alone how to measure it. In the context of digital marketing I think it’s one of those words that everyone understands but can’t define. In that respect it’s similar to loyalty. Everyone understands the concept of loyalty but there are all sorts of ways that it gets defined (attitudinal loyalty, behavioural loyalty etc) and there are even more ways that it gets measured.

The web analytics blogosphere has been full of articles and comments on the whole subject of engagement over the last month or so with titles such as:

“Engagement” Is Not A Metric, It’s An Excuse”

Engagement is not an excuse, it’s a KPI

Is “Engagement” Physical or Emotional?

Customer Engagement Is Measurable

As you can see, there’s been quite a debate with a range of different views being expressed. On the one hand there are what you might call the “behaviouralists” who believe that engagement can be defined and encapsulated in simple site metrics or an equation to produce a complicated “engagement index”. There are others who hold the belief that engagement is a state of mind and therefore can’t be measured by using anything as blunt as clickstream data. So after some consideration, where do I sit in this debate?  I’ll tell you; Firmly on the fence!

For me (and that’s the point) engagement is a personal condition. It’s about me, it’s not about you. Engagement is all about the context that I am operating in. I can be on a site one day doing a series of activities, interacting in a certain way and feel “engaged”. I can also be there another day doing pretty much the same thing but not feel so “engaged”. The difference between the two sessions is more about me, my sense of expectations, what kind of day I’ve had and so on. It may be nothing to do with the website. Having said that, of course it is useful, if not essential, to define and measure the volume of valuable behaviour on your website and even to use those measures to predict future outcomes.

So, I do wonder whether this notion of engagement is actually very useful. If we can’t describe it or define it, what can we do about it? And does it actually add to what we already know or want to know. From the behaviouralist’s point of view, if we believe that there are sets of valuable behaviour that lead to beneficial outcomes, why dress this up and call it engagement? Why not just have a VBI (Valuable Behaviour Index) instead of an Engagement Index? At least then we know what it is and what it means. The new Score product from WebTrends is a way of doing just that – identifying behaviour that is considered valuable, giving it a subjective value and then tracking it.

And from an attitudinal perspective, we already have loads of measures that help us understand the visitor experience in their terms. Measures such as customer satisfaction, propensity to return and propensity to recommend have been around for ages. They are all measures of what you might call “engagement”, so do we need another one? I know what it means when someone says they are likely to recommend the site their friends. What does it mean though if someone says they were “fairly engaged” with the site?

I started writing this article feeling somewhat inadequate. I’ve been reading lots of lengthy and well-written blogs and articles on this whole subject and I wondered what I could add to the debate. However, I felt that the question “What is engagement?” was one that I had been avoiding for too long. The answer is still “I don’t know”. But now, nor do I really care. I don’t think that having a definition of “engagement” and then finding tortuous ways to measure it really adds anything to our understanding of how to improve the visitor experience at the moment. At a time when the online experience is still quite often a poor experience, I think we already have enough tools in our toolbox to help us figure out what needs to be done.

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