How the Heck do you Measure Engagement?

So if you buy into the ideas behind content marketing (and you should), then you know that you want to create engaging content. Sounds good, right? But how do you know if your content actually engages? What is best practice blogging?

Well to start with, we’ve got to figure out what “engagement” really means. Literally, it means to agree to marry someone or to promise to be somewhere at a particular time. But really, that’s just being engaged. Okay, so what does it mean to “engage”? Here’s where it gets interesting. “Engage” has quite a few definitions – to occupy the attention of, to attract and hold, to bind in a pledge, and to enter into conflict with.

What’s the commonality here? These are psychological processes or states. Great, but how the heck do we measure that? What metrics suggest our readers’ attention has been attracted and held?

Content marketing and blogging specialists usually give us a laundry list of metrics to track:

• Number of repeat visitors – they come back because your stuff attracts and holds their attention
• Number of page views per visitor – and it was so good, they look for more
• Time spent on page – because they want to read every word and interpret every picture
• Number of subscribers – and, they want to make sure they get it again
• Number of comments posted – plus, it makes them want to talk to you too
• Number of shares, likes, retweets, etc. – and tell all of their friends about it
• Visitors referred from social media networks – so their friends can read it for themselves

Interesting that most corporate marketers actually use number of comments as their blog metric according to eMarketer and Blog2Print . Some people argue against comments as a metric because it is a pretty high threshold – readers have to not only be involved in your content but they have to be involved enough to take an extra behavioral  step and write back to you. These seems like an extreme version of the underlying engagement process. Rather than an “either-or”, perhaps engagement can best be assessed through a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures.

Let’s take a look at a recent email campaign we ran. Of course since this was email, the first metric we looked at is open rate – good news, the open rate was above industry average. This suggests the subject line and our reputation were at least minimally interesting. Can we say our readers were engaged, though? Probably not. Okay, so in this email we wanted them to click through (like most emails). What about an open to click rate? Now, that’s where we begin to see some engagement - that rate was very high, triple norms. Even better, there was an opportunity for a second click and over 80% did that. You’ve got to be pretty engaged to take 2 behavioral steps. But, probably the “data” that excited me the most was the volume and content of the emails we received back. An astonishing number of people wrote to tell us something: “loved this email”, “great idea”, “hey, you said one question but I actually answered three”… Take it all together and it surely suggests that our content was engaging. Even without the email feedback, the numbers say this campaign engaged our target.

But, does that mean the other content we’ve offered isn’t engaging? Probably not. The thing to remember about measuring engagement is that it is a psychological process. We look for behavioral indicators that this process is actually happening. In the extremely good instances, it’s easy to see. But, be careful not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” It could still be happening even when readers aren’t adding comments. The goal of your blog should be to humanize your marketing. The key is to know your numbers and track them over campaigns, posts and time. Are you getting more or less time spent, clicks, shares, likes, subscribers and/or comments than before? If not, check your content. If so, you are on the right track so keep going!