NebuAd's CEO explains what constitutes engagement, and why interactive is the perfect medium to build an audience.
Engagement is the latest term du jour. In many respects, it is like the term "change" that's being bandied about in political circles. Most people will tell you they are for it, but few will agree on its definition. Nevertheless, to date publishers haven't consistently demonstrated to advertisers that consumers on their sites are engaged with advertising content -- and when they do, they're often at a loss to explain exactly how such engagement will help the advertisers sell more product or service.
Nielson/NetRatings and comScore each have their own ways of defining and measuring consumer engagement. Nielsen/NetRatings' "total minutes" method measures consumer engagement from when a consumer enters a site and continues while the user is on the site and the browser window is in use. The clock stops when a user shifts to interact with a separate browser window. Similarly, comScore's "visits" measures the number of separate times people visit a site per day. With at least 30 minutes between each visit, comScore measures the frequency with which consumers interact with a page. Together, the metrics quantify length of a consumer's stay and frequency.
Former Jupiter Research analyst, Eric T. Peterson, has his own metrics for visitor engagement. Peterson's formula requires calculation "made over the lifetime of visitor sessions to the site and also accommodate different time spans." The criteria factored in are Click-Depth Index, Recency Index, Duration Index, Brand Index, Feedback Index, Interaction Index and "two small, binary weighting factors based on visitor behavior" -- Loyalty Index and Subscription Index. Peterson's formula is more dynamic than those of Nielson and comScore, but again largely measures frequency and the length of time consumers visit a site.
But regardless of the various theories of measuring engagement, most discussions of engagement are VERY publisher focused. While there's nothing wrong with talking about publishers, the primary role of publishers is to sell eyeballs to advertisers. In other words, an advertiser may not care per se that a visitor is engaged with the content -- what an advertiser REALLY cares about is that the visitor is engaged with the advertiser's message.
Is length of time or frequency the best way to measure whether a consumer is engaging with your brand?
The three methods of calculating consumer engagement cited above remind me of my FasTrak pass. FasTrak may indicate where I go, how much time I spend commuting and how many trips I take, but it doesn't tell anyone whether I've paid attention to any of the billboard ads alongside the freeway. In other words, just because someone is exposed to an ad doesn't mean the person will pay any attention to it.
I think one can argue that minutes spent playing around with an advertorial for a BMW may indicate interest in the BMW. However, I think that's less true when we're talking about time spent playing a game for a travel site -- unless I happen to be looking for a flight. Moreover, advertisers are less convinced that the length of time on a particular site positively impacts experience with a banner ad.
In other words, the amount of time spent on any one website does not necessarily measure engagement or connote affinity for a brand advertised on the website.
Deeper consumer engagement with media requires measurement equal to the task
Over the years, the definition of engagement has changed. Old methods of measuring consumer engagement require mathematical accountability, like time segments and clicks. If a consumer clicks on your ad surely he is engaged with your advertorial content, right? Wrong. In fact, new research commissioned by Tacoda and conducted by comScore finds 16 percent of internet users click on 80 percent of ads.
Worse yet, the study found that heavy-clickers aren't even representative of the general online population and a large percentage of clicks are unintentional.
Let's say a user conducts four searches for luxury hotels and visits five luxury hotel websites and an airline travel site -- if an advertiser was looking for a measure of engagement, doesn't that represent a much higher level than someone who happens by accident to click on a Hyatt Hotel ad? When publishers talk about "performance marketing" they should be able to draw this distinction for advertisers.
Performance and engagement now need to be evaluated from both a broader perspective encompassing multiple consumer touch points on the web, and from a deeper perspective that sheds light on consumer choices. Consumers are more technology savvy, linked-in, and therefore engaged more often and at a higher level.
Recently, eMarketer released data from its Consumer Interactions: Social Shopping, Blogs and Reviews report which finds, unsurprisingly, that consumers trust the opinion of "someone like them" before they trust brand messages. If you are a brand, the keys to engaging these consumers are relevance and communication, not a blind direct response sales pitch.