Thinking about some information I picked up while attending Virtual Worlds Hollywood this week; I am writing as I am in flight to Boston using my 3G IPhone, which has become pretty good as a blogging tool.

Having said that, spelling and pasting urls does not yet work well for the IPhone platform, forgive my errors here if there are any.

I detected 2 measures of Engagement that can be charted using web analytics or Audience Measurement data:

1. Frequency of visits (of engaged users of your site) with time spent per visit going up. (appeals more to site owners).

2. Frequency of visits (of engaged users) going up with time spent per visit going down (appeals to advertisers more).

However, in both cases, we’re looking at the activity and behavior of “engaged users”, not all visits to any site are going to be “engaged”. We need to segment visitors first, before we can calculate Site Engagement got a site.

Web analytics works if you can segment the traffic to your own site, but does not help you with engagement measurement of other competing sites.

Here’s what I propose as a solution for those having access to Audience type data(ie: Comscore, etc). I have experience with Comscore more than any other panal data, so I will stick to that.

We can chart engagement with the Segment Metrix Comscore product; Segment Metrixs segments all site visitation into heavy users, medium users and light users by time spent on a site.

Therefore, you can pick out the amount and percentage of heavy users from any site Comscore tracks and trend the data.

Pretty neat.

I dispose you can segment visitation frequency well enough, especially once you can segment users of a site to low, medium and high.

But, without something like segment metrics you would not be able to make much or any real determination on the quality of traffic beyond determing what sites traffic is already coming from.

So, if a shop has comscore they ought to by additional services like Segment Metrix.