Engagement. The most important, yet most poorly defined word in our industry. We know that's what marketing is all about, but we've never agreed on what it is and how to measure it. Definitions can be expansive. Watching an ad on TV, talking to a salesperson at Target, sporting a brand on your hat, chatting with friends about products you like, diving into a branded digital experience -- all are engagements and all matter, yet most of them happen outside of the view of any reliable measuring technology. Until we all have implants in our skulls, a lot of this just can't be quantified.
Yet advertisers want to know what value they are getting for their money. Accountability is the word of the day. As it should be. But the language doesn't exist yet to measure engagement in all its forms. So the industry has stalled. It's time to get moving again and to define engagement in terms of what is measurable.
That is only marginally less challenging. While the industry has grown, so too have the mechanisms that individual agencies, publishers, networks, and creative vendors have put in place to count what they deem to be important success metrics. And, to be honest, there's a lot of game playing going on.
I could log onto a site, nick the corner of a banner with my mouse, have a massive expansion cover the content I really came to read, spend 15 seconds trying to figure out how that happened -- and another trying to find the cleverly hidden close button -- all the while cursing the site, the advertiser, and life in general. But somewhere an ad server is counting a 30-second engagement, and a media buyer is happily reporting success to the client. How many times have you seen an ad impression on a redirect page (hint: none -- they're invisible, but the server doesn't know that)? Or an auto-playing video running silently beneath the scroll? Once, when I was on the agency side, I tried to figure out what great creative work had led to a super-high interaction rate, only to find that the vendor was counting clicks on the "close" button. And they were optimizing for the interaction rate. Imagine the expletives.
Even when everyone is being an upstanding citizen, we have a tower of Babel situation in the language of measurement. We have CPA, CPL, CTR, CPE, eCPM, complete views, brand lift, ad recall, time spent, and a host more. Agencies try to normalize all the different things they buy -- and their unique measurement methodologies -- through a Rosetta Stone of a spreadsheet that distills them into a common metric. But, naturally, every agency has a different spreadsheet.
It is crucial that, as an industry, we develop a common language to describe what constitutes engagement, perhaps with different categories of engagement (passive vs. active come to mind as very different groupings); what measurable indicators tell us that it's happened and to what degree; and the effects we are able to quantify. Until we do, it will continue to be difficult to tell the C-suite that we are providing value.
We need to all be involved in the conversation and approach it with honesty, integrity, and respect for the ways consumers interact with advertising. What we need is to develop a measurement model that cuts through the murk and heads toward a vernacular that can compare all of these creative executions, technologies, and media types.
That model should have the following characteristics:
- A trigger that validates the intent of the user. For VideoEgg, an engagement doesn't start until a user has hovered over the ad for three consecutive seconds and waited through a 3-2-1 countdown. Is that the only way to qualify intent? Probably not. Show us a better one, and we'll adopt it. But it's intended to -- and does -- eliminate accidents.
- A measure of the scale of the engagement. Time spent can be captured, and there is research that shows that greater time spent correlates to greater brand lift. But ideally, we would develop a system that accounts not only for time but for the various secondary actions that one can take with an ad. Clicks to a site? Great. Sharing seems great too, but how do we capture and evaluate the message that accompanies the share? Through research we need to determine the relative value of common secondary actions and normalize against these.
- Post-exposure attribution tracking. Dynamic Logic is a common metric for brand lift, but because of the methodology -- as well as the difficulty in retargeting engagers, as opposed to an audience exposed at the impression level -- it is of limited value. View-through is a blunt instrument that assumes that a post-engagement brand interaction happens on a site the advertiser controls, which isn't really the norm; if you're considering a car, you might go to Tesla's website or you might go to Cars.com. Until we have agreed-upon norms, every advertiser and agency needs to develop a model that works across both impression-based and engagement-based media.
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