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.

Was thinking of Eric Peterson's post today on Omniture: Visitor Engagement is just a fad! where he said if you haven't yet figured out how to leverage key assets then …

"… you will benefit more from focusing internally and learning more about how to leverage people, process, and technology more effectively, rather than look externally for new metrics of success.  You could get a good book on the subject of fundamental key performance indicators and spend a great deal of time implementing what you learn."

But, if your organization has figured out how to leverage it's key assets and defined KPI's then … you'll keep reading his blog to learn ..

"… more about an innovative metric that describes the behavior and opportunity that exists with the 97% that don’t convert, a measure that you can apply to your advertising, content, B2B, marketing, or lead generation site that will compliment your otherwise robust key performance indicator suite, and a calculation that describes the level of Attention that visitors are paying to your site, your content, your testing and targeting, etc… well then I guess you’ll have to keep reading my blog (and Jim, and Steve, and Joseph, and a whole host of other people’s work who are committed to working these ideas out rather than just saying “balderdash!”)

I have to admit, while I as at Emetics SF in May, I didn't hear the details of the Engagement Metrics, so I don't know much work it would take to set up.

It was also was somewhat disturbing to think that Omniture might not be all that "committed" to Visual Site …

"…Worse, it makes me question Omniture’s long-term commitment to Visual Site customers since Visual (= Omniture Discover OnPremise) is, at least for now, the industry’s leading solution for creating derived measures and experimenting with visitor-level data.  The point seems to be that simple measures of success, such as those provided by SiteCatalyst, are all that are required."

If that's the case, it's probably, I suspect, because the interface isn't that easy to work with and Visual Sciences is hard to set up and hard to maintain from I've been seeing – but then, neither is Omniture Site Catalyst, to be honest.

I was able to meet with Shahar Nechmad, the CEO of NuConomy yesterday and get a full interview and glimpse of the NuConomy Web Analytics and Engagement Network Platform which I think – is the fullest view of the product anyone has filmed yet.

I had a great time speaking with Shahar Nechmad, who also came to the Web Analytics Wednesday that took place after the end of Day 2 of Emetrics Summit SF.

Here's the YouTube Videos – Part 1 is followed by Parts 2 & 3 – Enjoy!