Red Door Interactive's president explains how advertising on a deeply engaging site may detract attention from your ads.
Something that we actively measure here at Red Door Interactive is the metric of engagement. There are myriad data points that we put together in order to quantify "engagement," which others at iMedia have described in a few different ways, so I won't go through our methods here. Generally speaking, we want to maximize the amount of engaged users visiting our clients' websites. An engaged user is going to stay longer, buy more and return more often than a non-engaged user. Makes sense.
The employee engagement analogy
In business management, experts will tell you that engaged employees are more productive and remain with the company longer. You typically want more engaged employees in your company and you're happy when you have a lot of them. On the flip-side, if you were a competitor trying to lure employees from that highly engaged workplace, what would you do to encourage someone to leave and do something else?
To lure someone away from a company where they are actively engaged, your offer would need to be compelling and present more satisfaction than what they're already experiencing. That can be a pretty tough thing to do when you're not completely sure what is engaging them. Is it the benefits? Is it their boss? Is it the camaraderie? Something is keeping them there and keeping them focused on the tasks at hand. Online advertising, in a weird way can be similar to employee recruiting in that you're trying to encourage users to depart from their engaged activity and take a different action.
How engagement affects website visitors
Granted, there is the difference between recruiting and advertising where a website visitor can return to the earlier site by hitting a back-button. But, the goal for a direct response campaign is generally to get a user to commit beyond the back button.
Successful social networking sites, for example, pride themselves on having a highly engaged audience that returns to the site frequently, spends a long time on the site and connects with other users. So, if you're an online advertiser, your offer to depart that environment either needs to be highly attractive or should reach out to a less engaged audience.
We find something different with sponsored listings on major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! Here, all of the users are engaged, though their commitment is to finding something else. In other words, in the employee recruiting analogy, it is more like putting your information on a job board where job seekers are already actively looking for new jobs.
So, should an advertiser be looking for a less engaged audience when it comes to online advertising? I would answer that it depends on the goal of the communication. If you are interested in branding yourself to a highly targeted audience, I would say that engaged users, such as those on social networks, are susceptible to your branding messages. However, if you are looking for a more direct marketing approach, I encourage you to look to sites with less engaged audiences (less social networking, perhaps), but with high-traffic. So, you're looking for a site with a high visit frequency, high loyalty, but shallow depth of visit. Basically, the hope is that a user will be okay with departing because they've completed their primary action. So, with that in mind, we've found that news sites and reference sites typically yield better conversion rates for direct response-oriented campaigns.
At the end of the day, you still need to offer a compelling proposition to the appropriate target, but set yourself up for a greater chance at success by reaching a "less engaged" audience. That audience will be more likely to click on your ad because they're not overly committed to where they are in the first place. Then, they'll move through a new path to conversion because they don't feel the desire to turn back.
Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive. Read full bio.