I view engagement as the time a person came in contact for the first time with the business and till the time, this person becomes a customer to be an upsell candidate or repeat customer to be engaged in a different manner. It is a continous process.

If we really do not measure engagement across channels then as a whole we might miss the complete implication of a channel. Very often, rather most often people do all their research about a product on a Web site and go to some local store to buy the product. In such cases though the sale happened through a store but Web site played a major role in engaging with the customer. The Page views/Product view for a particular product from a particular region and the sale from a store in that are can be corelated to identify the role that a web site played. I would say if we miss this piece of information then we are really not tying all our channels together.

It probably is semantics.
Engage to me is when you hit the first touch point and your actions after that. Measuring this is very important, and we’ve got quite sophisticated with it. Way beyond page views per visit. Nurturing the customer is what I see Jim Novo’s field as (simplistically speaking). Engagement to me is when the visitor engages with the creative and what he/she does.

To most web analytics folk I’ve worked with this is what engagement is. Forrester agree, so do TNS, so do prominent analysts and customers I’ve worked with.

So my point and hence my stance is the exact point Avinash was trying to make, why call engagement something it aint? At least according to everyone else?

Except perhaps advanced BI folk that do in depth CRM, predictive data mining work like Jim Novo and Avinash. My customers don’t have too many of those people sitting in their offices. They understand engagement as point of contact.

Avinash’s post seems to strongly disagree with this stance and belittles the approach (at least the approach using the name engagement) which I know works which is why I reacted to it. Nurture phases (measuring engagement with the customer and measuring what they don’t do) requires a lot of qualitative data which is typically much more expensive to do. Without measuring what I call engagement first I can’t justify that expense to my customers.

I agree with you and had many of the same questions you raise in your post. I was at SEMphonic X Change week before last and heard several great examples of how engagement metrics have been successfully used on both a very large and also a very small scale.

I’ve thought a lot about measuring engagements using reasonable proxies and like you am absolutely convinced it can be done. Maybe not using Google Analytics, but using reasonably powerful tools it is possible to build a more informative metric than just page views per visit.

Anyway, nice post!

Eric T. Peterson
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com

I have benefited tremendously from feedback from peers and thought leaders in the little web analytics fish bowl.

I welcome your feedback and thank you for adding to the conversation.

-Avinash.