Engagement is perhaps the buzzword of the year for digital and social media marketers.
For starters, it's not actually something you can measure – engagement means how much someone exposed to your marketing is intellectually and emotionally connected to the content they’re experiencing. And unfortunately, we can't ever know that in any meaningful or large scale way because we can't read every consumer’s mind.
When marketers talk about engagement, what they’re actually talking about is the behaviour of consumers, and extrapolating back to attitudes. Our measures of engagement are our best guesses as to what consumers are thinking and feeling when they see our marketing content.
So how do you actually measure the ethereal engagement in digital and social marketing?
1. Comments
Comments are among the
absolute best ways to measure engagement. It's unfortunate that they so often get lumped in with vanity metrics such as likes and retweets, because they really are a different beast.
Social media platforms today, like Twitter and Facebook, have superbly designed UX that make sharing and retweeting extremely easy. This is great, but it means that the active energy required to retweet or like something is actually very low.
So, yes, these are proof of engagement, but they're essentially passive engagement, and thus not a great reflection of a potential customer's attitudes.
Commenting, on the other hand, requires a potential customer to think of something to say, type it out, and potentially even qualify themselves in some way, perhaps with an email address (
or just a phone number, if Twitter has their way). In short, it's a lot more work for the user.
This might seem like a bad design, but a by-product of it is that those commenters are actively engaged with your marketing. Their engagement is an accurate reflection of their attitude, which is why comments are such a great metric to follow.
2. User Flow
Analytics on your company website can be completely overwhelming, but there is one that stands out as an excellent indicator of engagement: user flow.
User flow is basically the trail that a user blazes through your website. For example, a user might enter through a Tweet to your blog, read three more posts by the same author, check out their bio in the ‘about us’ tab, and the reach out via a contact form.
That's the user flow.
Looking at where the user goes and how they get there is a superb measure of engagement. If a user lands on your blog but does not dive into the rest of the site, they probably like your content but have no desire to work with you.
On the other hand, if all your website users are traveling through your site but no one is reading more than one blog post, then they’re not connected enough to want to do more with you. User flow lets you get an idea of what specific content is working, but more importantly the path engaged users are taking.
You can see if one blog author or post is doing a great job of leading users to your goal page, or if one page is just not resonating with your viewers, and can
tweak your digital strategy based on that.
3. Conversion
This is the big one. Conversion – a potential customer putting up their hand saying they'd like to start a conversation – is the best measure of engagement. It's also the metrics that is easiest to correlate to a bottom dollar value, and is prized accordingly.
The actual metric for a conversion can vary, but every channel should have one. For a website, it could be
a request to join your newsletter. For your newsletter, it could be the how many reached out to talk to a sales team or signed up for an event.
By tracking that conversion, and tracking conversion rate, you can see how well a campaign is doing, how well a particular newsletter is doing, a piece of copy, or any other chunk of your marketing mosaic. Plus, analytics programs usually let you track micro-conversions – smaller exchanges with your target audience that build to one major conversion, like speaking to the sales team.
That means you have one metric to compare every channel, and every aspect of every channel, to really let you drill down into what works and what doesn’t for engaging your customers.
These are three ways to measure digital marketing engagement, but the best way is to do them together. By tracking these metrics, instead of counting unique visitors or Facebook page likes, you can see:
- Where your valuable customers are coming from
- What marketing channel is resonating with them
- Where your marketing machine is wasting money
With some simple tracking over a period of time, you can learn exactly what your user want, and more effectively turn potential customers into faithful repeat business.
