Over the past year ENGAGEMENT has been the big buzz on Madison Avenue and the overall marketing world. Every marketer has faced the question of ROI on spending but was just a financial measure, ENGAGEMENT is an eMOTIONal one... How do we get to it?
To date interactive marketing spend in the CPG world has yet to exceed the 7-10% threshold, clearly driven by the fact that conversion cannot be measured just from a "visit" to a iMarketing website. Although AMAZON.com, some niche-niche products, custom cosmeticeutical, adult use products have bridged the gap, there is a long way to go for the household use products, foods, automobiles, clothes, etc.
Much like I told the COO of one of the major media metrics companies, I believe until we get to a point where we can measure true conversion from visit to a brands iMarketing website or at least find a common sense way to translate the visit into purchase ENGAGEMENT, may be an uphill battle.
MediaPost had an article yesterday on the question of Measuring User Engagement In A New Metrics World there were some interesting points made:
- Many have dropped the page view altogether as an audience metric.
- To fill the void, vendors are coming up with their own interpretations of engagement.
- This "visits" metric, defined as the number of times a unique person accesses content (with breaks between accesses of at least 30 minutes) is a key component of user engagement, explained comScore.
- an alternative for measuring user engagement that tells us how frequently visitors are actually returning to the site to view more content.
- The challenge and opportunity therefore, for vertical content publishers, is to combine engagement metrics with strong compelling content to those users who are engaged with the site.
- offer content to users anytime and anyplace, through the Web and on their mobile device, for instance.
- content is what drives loyalty and engagement.
