A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

Q. Some have criticised online customer engagement as an abstract concept 

that can’t be readily applied in the real world. Can you give some practical 

examples of how a site owner can apply the engagement concept to get better 

results?

Avinash Kaushik, Google:

 Engagement is a nice goal to have. Create sites that cus-

tomers will find engaging and they’ll stick around or come back again or maybe do 

business with you.

But that term has been manipulated to a point where it means nothing any more (or 

everything to everyone) and is often used as an excuse to know do the hard work of fig-

uring out what the real outcomes of the site are for the company and the website visitors.

My encouragement to website owners is to be initially sceptical when someone is 

trying to pawn off ‘engagement’ on them and ask the tough question: ‘What do you 

really mean by engagement and how does it specifically apply to my business?’

M12_CHAF6542_06_SE_C12.indd   599

7/22/14   1:41 AM

---

600

Part 3  Implementation

Secondly, I encourage people to realise that on the most glorious spring day when the 

birds are chirping the right song, web analytics tools can measure the Degree of engage-

ment but they fall quite a bit short of measuring the Kind of engagement. So they can report 

that Visitors saw 19 pages on your site (Degree) but they can’t tell you if that was because 

the Visitors were frustrated with your crappy navigation or thrilled with your content.

People use Google Analytics (or other tools) to easily measure various elements of the 

Degree of engagement. Perhaps the simplest example is using the bounce rate for the 

core landing pages to identify pages that won’t even entice Visitors to make one click!

In two clicks you can also get Loyalty (recency), Frequency, Length of Visit and 

Depth of Visit to get a solid feel for if Visitors are making repeat visits to the site or if 

they do it more frequently and marry that up with content consumption. Doing this by 

looking at trends over time is a fantastic way to understand if the site is delivering value 

for your customers.

For many ‘social’ websites, website owners also measure the number of people 

who sign up and then contribute by writing reviews or comments, etc.

All really good examples of (1) measuring the degree of engagement and (2) not 

confusing the real metric being measured by calling it engagement.