I've been knocking my head against the wall, week after week, for the last 10 months working and reporting on Engagement Metrics, specificially for IBM's homepage.  But it's also true there's no actual metric for "Engagement". 

Eric Peterson has done more to try to put Engagement into an equation than anyone else.  It also helps Eric to have Visual Sciences to map the equations against real data, on the fly, and come up with interesting diagrams of Engagement by Content Area, which also draw on Gary Angel's observation that visitor segmentation needs to also reflect consumption of site content - which Eric tries to chart (see below).

"…..I know it's hard to see, but I simply dragged a bunch of pages, groups of pages, and content groups onto the page visualization map and told Visual Site to color the nodes by visitor engagement (the height of the bars represents the relative number of sessions to each node.) I could then select-in or select-out visitors based on their relative level of engagement to identify the special kinds of customers Gary refers to."

I think this is almost "there".

OK, let's go back to what I've come up as Engagement Metrics (leaving out the details - which I can't talk about anyway).  The Web Metrics platforms I have to work with are somewhat limited for measuring something as elusive as Engagement - IBM Surfaid and a pilot implementation of Coremetrics - the segmentation Gary talks about would be very difficult to do at this stage - but here's what I've come up with:

Engagement Metric 1 -  # of clicks on a specific landing page / # of clicks from a promo or specific page to the landing page.   Example: If there were 1556 clicks from the homepage to a landing page, and there were 1000 clicks on the links of the landing page …

    1000 clicks on landing page / 1556 clicks to that page = 64.2% Engagement Score

If the page were very interactive (ie: a lot of neat Flash animations and it's tagged so the Flash actions can be tracked - which I've often done) then we might see something like this:

   4000 clicks on landing page  / 1556 clicks to that page = 257% Engagement Score

So the Engagement Score for that "landing page" can be greater than 100%.  What's considered "Low Engagement" vs. Medium Engagement vs. High Engagement?  That's up to you.  Here's how I define it

• Low Engagement         = 0% - 50%
• Medium Engagement     = 51% 100%
• High Engagement         = > 100%

What that really means is …. on average, visitor are clicking on more than one link on the landing page.

Let's add Segmentation to the mix.

• Search Traffic to Landing Page = 20% of page traffic
• Intranet Traffic to Landing Page = 4% of page traffic
• Promo Ad Traffic to Landing Page = 59% of page traffic
• No Referral Traffic to Landing Page = 17% of page traffic

I could then do the same calculation on each of the segments above (ie)

- 55 clicks (visits) came from external search engines that generated 20 clicks on the landing page - the rest either went to another page or left the site.

Search Traffic Engagement = 20 clicks on landing page / 55 clicks from search engine  = 36% External Search Engine Engagement (with the content of the landing page).

And what you'd end up with is ….

• Search Engagement        = 36%
• Intranet Engagement       =  7%
• Promo Engagement          = 212%
• No Referral Engagement    = 44%

Guess where I'm going to spend my money?

Engagement Metric #2   Number of Return visits from a specific audience segment on day 1 / total number of visits from a specific audience segment on day 1  - Compared to Return visits on day 2 / total visits from specific audience on day 2 , etc.

Again, your web metrics package might not allow you to really segment audiences this way - but suppose it could - then you could do a calculation like this for a landing page about Online Gaming:

• 1200 visits from Online Gaming Enthusiasts to Gaming Page Promo during day 1.
• 50 visits (of the 1200) were repeat visits from Online Gaming Enthusiasts during day 1
• 2600 visits to the Online Gaming Enthusiasts to promo page on day 2
• 660 return visits to promo page from gaming enthusiasts on day 2

OK,    50/1200 =  4.1 % Engagement from target audience on  Day 1

OK,  660/2600 =  25.3% Engagement from target audience on Day 2

You would look at the change from day 1 to day 2, etc - ie:

Engagement Score increase by 600% from day 1 to day 2  - therefore Promotion is very engaging to the Target Audience. 

However, if there was little change from day 1 to day 2 - that would signal the content was not that engaging or there the level of engagement reached a plateau and maybe it's time to recycle the ad.

I haven't really dealt with the social media part of Engagement here - but I think it could be done, more or less, the same way - provided you can measure social activity and segment it (ie: how many of the same segment of subscribers came to my blog today vs yesterday, etc).

Engagement Metric # 3 - % of landing page traffic goes deeper into specific content of a site.

For example - if I'm an automotive site creating a page to highlight brake problems and I get 1200 visits to my brake parts landing page - how may of those visitors end up going to later look at other brake part pages on my site?   If 300 of the 1200 visitors end up looking at other brake part pages - that says 25% of the audience for a page or promo went further into the site for that topic - meaning they were "engaged" or highly interested.

All I'd have to do then is decide what my goals were (if I run an promo on brakes and only 15% of my page visits end up looking at other brake parts on my site …I'm not happy; but if 30% did look at other brake parts on my site - I'm very happy. 

There are other audience metrics I could get into - but it's getting late and I think I've written enough, for now.