New audience metric needed: engagement
I was just reading Jeneane Sessum’s post about the latest Ze Frank/Rocketboom dustup and she’s right, we need to measure stuff other than just whether a download got completed or not. She says we need a “likeability” stat. I think it goes further than that.
There’s another stat out there called “engagement.” No one is measuring it that I know of.
What do I mean?
Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see.
Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.
So, why should engagement matter to an advertiser?
Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale.
Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.
My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today, but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention.
How could we measure audience engagement?
Is this something that Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab could do? If he could, that’d be a valuable company that advertisers would die to buy stuff from.
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October 25th, 2006 at 8:08 am
Audience metrics are desperately needed; I don’t know how many people completely watch my videos when you only have to start one to be counted.
Link rank can and is gamed, clickbots are out there, but how does Nelson rate TV shows now that we all have remotes in our hands surfing the dial?
October 25th, 2006 at 8:12 am
Robert — there’s a metric we use in the learning/training world called “Kirkpatrick’s Levels” that could be remodeled for a framework.
http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/k4levels/index.htm
Basic premise is that when you teach someone a new idea, there are four levels of learning.
1. Reactions (they heard you)
2. Learning (they understood and retained)
3. Transfer (they took in the information and can apply)
4. Results (they use the learning to achieve a goal)
An example would be telling your child about tieing his shoes, him understanding the principle of making the bunny ears, doing the task with your coaching, and finally tieing his shoes alone.
I propose a four-level model for measuring engagement:
1. Click - A reader arrived (current metric)
2. Consume - A reader read the content
3. Understoon - A reader understood the content and remembers
4. Applied - A reader applies the content in another venue
Each of these could be measured (with accuracy pretty closely connected to your budget) and compared with other ways of getting the information out.
What do you think?
October 25th, 2006 at 8:17 am
This is an OLD topic of conversation. I can remember diving into it in 2001 pretty seriously, the writing was on the wall back then.
It would be great to dig up some of that old material and find out what others have been doing with this as well.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:36 am
Good point on engagement. This is the part of the conversation that breaks out of the traditional CPM model (or ups the cpm cost depending on how you break it down); each eyeball has half a mouth. :)
October 25th, 2006 at 8:41 am
Direct marketers have been using engagement measures on the web for a while, it’s easy with the logging available on a web site.
“The more people interact with you the more they will buy from you.”
October 25th, 2006 at 8:50 am
whoa… one of your best posts in a long time.
indeed, it’s hard to parametrize an audience, but I think engagement is definitly something to be measure more accurately for marketers.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:54 am
I was thinking about this the other day from the point of view of blog promotion.
Social networks are fine and dandy, but the ideal audience for a blogger is other bloggers because they can link, they are likely to get involved, and they have their own audience.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:05 am
[...] Robert Scoble - who still matters, even though he’s left Microsoft - makes an interesting point about ‘engagement’. All the talk these days is about it. Yet there’s no easy way to measure it. He offers a few interesting numbers as a starting point, though: When the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400. [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 9:10 am
One of the registers failings is that it very seldom links to anything (this is a generic problem with “news” type sites - article about something or someone and no link to the product page or their bio, it can be done - the BBC does it very well).
October 25th, 2006 at 9:44 am
“…no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement…”
Or they are claiming that their audience has high engagement with THEIR site and its articles and so doesn’t want to leave to go to another site. If content is too compelling (esp. video) surely there’s a tendancy for one to not click on a link, which is why video content needs video advertising and we’re back to CPM deals again instead of CPC.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:46 am
I couldn’t agree more with the idea of measuring engagement which I also refer to as the energy an individual or group will commit to a product/idea. So, to tackle the idea of measuring it.
1. While I recognize it’s obvious, track which sites are driving the most viewers to the product/idea specific page.
2. Measure how much discussion is taking place about the product/idea by creating a metrics tool that uses Technorati, Google Groups, and so forth. The software will then pull a random sample of comments so that somebody can put a qualitative score on whether the discussion is favorable or not to and how relevant is the discussion.
For videos, a question I have regarding Quicktime development is whether it is possible to (1) layer graphics over the quicktime movie which pull from the internet and (2)can some rudimentary logic (through Qscript) be built into to Quicktime to test for an internet connection and if so, display the track that uses graphics from a web site otherwise use the track that has graphics imbedded into the movie? If that is possible, it seems this is the answer to how much of a video someone has watched and then the ability to track whether they took action on a link in the video.
My final idea related to this is a quicktime type server that wraps the video track with a track containing links back to the server so that each video downloaded has a unique identifier built into the link. It’s then possible to get an idea of how often people are sharing the video by checking which IP addresses between initial downloads of the video and links via the video.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:59 am
While I see the value for better overall definition of an audience, “engagement” falls into that vague “eyeballish” zone. It doesn’t really mean anything. And “engaged” exactly how, as ‘engaged’ audiences might be twice the effort and cost, for the same result. Maybe for some advertisers better to narrow on the extreme targeted or busy types who want raw facts fast. You can’t expect the CFO’s to play engagement games.
Some people are busy running companies and don’t want to cuddle up with vendors all the live day long. If said product doesn’t work or doesn’t meet needs or isn’t at a good pricepoint, they will just get a new vendor. And sometimes (in fact, imho, most often) the most engaged audiences are those with the least amount of power (as they have the raw time to engage). Don’t discount the busy and aloof, that’s sometimes the real gold.
And you can’t really compare USA Today audiences with bloggers, maybe only a few clicked thru, but maybe one was a busy CIO (who has no time for blog chatter) but saw it in USA Today when they shoved it under his hotel door, a CIO who decides to order 100 copies. Clicks aren’t the end-all, that’s too blogger nose-leveled view.
The only metric (to the advertiser that counts) is increased marketshare, engaged or not. But don’t get me wrong, “engagement” or happy customers is vital too, just not the end all. Engaged customers do spread that ‘word’ around. And CIO types ask other CIOs and pick up the general vibe. And “engagement” gives a product a sense of being alive and provides a support framework.
October 25th, 2006 at 10:02 am
In the ecommerce world we call this ‘click to sale conversion rate’
October 25th, 2006 at 10:38 am
PS - Getting Steve Gillmor on anything would just buzzword it all up, angel-dust freebasing pure unintelligible nonsense, and scare off 90% of advertisers. You really think anyone from Peoria would understand a word Steve says?
And Steve is well just loony and agenda-driven, witness…
TV is dead because of the Internet. TV is dead because we don’t have time for it.
Geee really? With Full Season DVDs, with Tivo/Replay, Media Center’s and PVR’s de jour, with Portable Video Players and iTunes and ilk, and even gray-area MPEG4s, (XVID, DIVX) formats on MASSIVE Torrent swarms, we have MUCH MUCH more time than ever before. The Internet ENHANCES TV, makes it MORE valuable, it provides that “engagement” level. The long-story arc becomes more viable, giving us better TV; death to the sitcomy episodic. Heck, has he never met the Battlestar Galactica, Veronica Mars, Lost or 4400 fan? People spend hours on forums talking, debating about TV. And what does he think makes up 50% of YouTube….TV clips. Oh we are watching, much much more than before, the big question is how to fund it all, those models are changing.
October 25th, 2006 at 11:00 am
Very good points. Comscore vs Danah on Myspace stats recently got into the challenges facing the difference between a user who simply loads a page and leaves vs a user who engages with the site.
Experiments are needed, since it may be as simple as taking a ratio of total unique visitors to total time online to get a sense of how engaged the visitors are.
Of course that does NOT necessarily translate into a buyer. I’m engaged here at Scobleizer, but not looking at your ads.
October 25th, 2006 at 11:02 am
Hey, I was wrong - I did know you advertised Naked Conversations (which I have and enjoyed reading). You have no other ads up so I can’t say I didn’t see them!
October 25th, 2006 at 11:20 am
joeduck: but increasingly the advertising will be inside the content. See PayPerPost.
October 25th, 2006 at 11:26 am
I support the local climbing shop for a reason. Even though the local price is higher than online. Sorry it has taken me so long to purchase your book Robert.
It is my humble way of saying I support your efforts to enlighten the messes ; ).
October 25th, 2006 at 11:38 am
Brilliant post. Keep up the good work!
October 25th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
[...] Far be it from me to take issue with Jeneane Sessum, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or with Robert Scoble for that matter, but until we can measure likeability or engagement then downloads will have to do. And it seems obvious that unless Andrew Baron of Rocketboom is a complete and utter liar when he talks about his statistics, Rocketboom is leagues ahead of Ze Frank. This all stems from the recent throwdown between Ze and the Rocket. [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Great post…Even the pages views are no good these days because of all the AJAX that is used. Indeed, what we need is something to capture engagement…
AttentionTrust approach could be used to capture the engagement metric. See my take on them at
http://karmaweb.wordpress.com/2006/10/19/attentiontrust/
Thanks, Jitendra
October 25th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
[...] Robert Scoble has an interesting post on the need of measuring the engagement level of the users of a web site. He talks about the difference in user engagement between the Register and Digg: Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see. [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
[...] Robert Scoble wrote today about the need for a new audience metric. Coincidentally I’d been writing about it late last week: [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
[...] Robert Scoble’s asking a great question today about how to measure “engagement” at a website as opposed to just a visit. This issue was recently addressed at some length in the big debate over Comscore metrics for Myspace that Danah Boyd challenged as questionable. [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Seriously? Last time I got linked from the Register, there was an avalanche which made Slashdot look like some kid’s Livespace journal.
Perhaps you just got a link from one of Orlowski’s pages. Nobody reads those. :)
October 25th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Scoble Diggs Up Cost Per Influence
Robert Scoble asks:How could we measure audience engagement?What he is after isn’t engagement, but influence. Here’s the answer I’ve been trying to encourage others to implement: Metric: Cost Per Influence Format: Sell Side Advertising
October 25th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Three thoughts:
LIKEABILITY see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_Score, although I can’t say much for Nielsen Ratings these days, maybe next year
ACTIONABILITY go beyond GestureLab, comSCORE seems overly qualified
INFLUENCE POWER wait for the algo look toward political marketing agencies bet on real social research that seeks to solve real problems beyond meme optimization
October 25th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
[...] What’s more amusing? Scoble and New Media folks discover “engagement,” a term that the old advertising establishment has been “engaged” with for quite some time. Or, that hot and utterly hip video blogging has been caught up in a he said, he said spat over audience measurement. Welcome to media! These guys sound like a bunch of stuffy old TV networks. [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
[...] It’s time for some Marketing Metrics 101, kids. I offer this quick tutorial, inspired by Jeneane Sessum’s call for a likeability measure, and Robert Scoble’s call for an engagement measure. [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
[...] tomorrow, after I save the free world with a Josh Groban record. You can leave a response, or trackback from your ownsite. [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
hot potato! it is an area oft tread but not thoroughly reviewed nor defined. investigations have been cursory for predefined needs. will look forward to seeing all that this elicits.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Robert,
Check out my original proposal for AxL: The Attention Exchange Language:
http://johnfederico.brandbrains.net/archives/2006/06/29/axl-the-attention-exchange-language/
http://johnfederico.brandbrains.net/archives/2006/10/03/podango-unconference-presentation/
Comments are welcome, of course.
Regards,
-jf.
-
John Federico
http://www.newrules.com
http://johnfederico.brandbrains.net
http://www.odmcast.com
October 25th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
Robert,
We could not agree with you more.
Compete (www.compete.com) just released a product that features 13 month traffic trends on any and every site our member community has ever visited… Including two very important components of engagement - Average Stay in minutes and Pages viewed per Visit.
*Think Alexa on steroids*.
Disclosure: Compete is my Employer
October 25th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Again, I am reminded why I like Chris Coulter. It is because he is smart.
‘Engagement’ is difficult to define, not to mention measure. And, truth be told, just going where the herd is directed is very common in the blogoshpere. I remember being pleased to be a popular blogger back in the day, only to be surprised by how little time most readers spent at my blog when they visited. Often, it was not long enough for them to have actually read a single entry in full. On the other hand, merely leaving a page open for a longer time can be confused with being engaged. Often, the person just forgot to close that window in his browser.
As for likeability, that is an invitation for superficiality. Often people who are intelligent and know their craft well are not particularly likeable. I would rather read or watch that kind of blogger than someone considered ‘nice.’
October 26th, 2006 at 1:49 am
One of the important measures of engagement is the ratio between posts and comments as well as the links to post ratio. This can be further determined by some of the attention issues around number of posts bookmarked and number of bookmarkers.
But I dont honestly know if engagement is the thing - it is a better thing to strive for then reach and popularity, but I tihnk we can do better even.
Supposedly the big advertising associations are thinking about this same metric (engagement via social media) but I don’t trust them with it. It is kind of like asking the car salesman which bicycle to buy…
October 26th, 2006 at 2:42 am
[...] Robert Scoble looks at the need for better web metrics, focusing on a need to measure “engagement” on a website. He illustrates his point comparing two sites, and what would happen if they added a link to your website on their page. He posits that a site such as The Register would result in few clicks over to you, which a mention on Digg would send a ton of traffic your way. [...]
October 26th, 2006 at 3:27 am
Engagement is a difficult thing to measure as it is so dependent on time. For me the best way to tell if I have been ‘engaged’ by a site (or anything else for that matter) is to see if I am still using it after 2 or 3 months. Humans love following fads (hence web 2.0!) and I find myself using new sites/products intensively for a matter of days or weeks before moving on to something else. Only a very small minority of these will see me returning consistently over a long period of time. I’ve no idea how you are meant to measure that!
October 26th, 2006 at 4:34 am
Engagement
What Scobe says is right. Its not simply the size of the audience, but the level of engagement that matters.
Scoble explains:
Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. …
October 26th, 2006 at 5:57 am
[...] So, Dave covers usefulness and Robert mentions engagement. My contribution was just that now’s not the time to tear it up and that we should be working together. Jeneane Sessum says I’m wrong, and she might be right. [...]
October 26th, 2006 at 6:12 am
I’m amazed at all of the web navel gazing here and that no one has stepped back and asked the obvious question. What is the difference between USA Today readers and Robert’s readers? That is the simple Marketing 101 question. Robert’s readers are by definition more technically minded and much more likely to be attracted to ActiveWords as a product. It’s not a question of engagement, it’s a question of segmentation and matching the product’s attraction to the most profitable market subsegments. What Buzz is actually saying is that USA Today readership is a broad market with a low Heavy Usage Index (a measure of the relative intensity of consumption) for the software product category under which Active Words falls. Clearly Scoble’s readers who are largely techs and business people who work for tech companies are focused on the cutting edge and are much more likely to purchase Active Words because they are willing to implement a productivity solution on their computer and futz around with Macros. Engagement? That is a contrived metric because it pretends to say that it measures how willing people are to “engage” with a website, when the reality changes depending on the consumer segment who is attracted to your particular market. The true measurements of interest should be metrics like purchase habits, loyalty, heavy usage index, and segment utilities. When you are able to properly target your products, then engagement comes naturally. So the real question is, how tightly does a website align with the key interests that define your highest potential consumers and how frequently do they come back to it.
October 26th, 2006 at 8:21 am
Most metrics from enterprise system administrators gage logon’s and time in the system as key indicators of favorable use of the system. Which is bunk, mainly due to it not indicating problems with crashes, analysis stalling, etc etc.
I agree with the “likeability metric” per user. The system “sucks or not” and reasons why would give better feedback to key developers and CIO’s without the need for costly and ineffective surveys which can be fudged or skewed in favor of the old “what do you want it to be?” guys which may be linked to profit driven support.
RSS KISS SOS. INNOVATE don’t stagnate. This new conversation media is a step in the right direction to both consumer satisfaction and bottom-line profit if used correctly. IMHO and probably wrong O. No flaming required. ; )
October 26th, 2006 at 8:48 am
[...] Update: More conversation by Jeneane Sessum on likeability. I thought she was going another way until the very end because Ze Frank has a lot of positives but likeability isn’t one I’d ascribe - more like “manic creepy charisma.” Perhaps she means the show as a whole is likeable. I think it is offputting by design rather than likeable but however you want to score it. Scoble suggests engagement as a metric which is not unlike what I’ve been saying for the last two years. [...]
October 26th, 2006 at 10:12 am
[...] This phenomenon is mirrored online. Blogebrity Robert Scoble expressed a desire on his blog that some algorithmic genius develop a measure of engagement, or likeability, to better represent the impact of bloggers. He speaks from personal experience to illustrate the power of the online relationship: [...]
October 26th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
[...] This phenomenon is mirrored online. Blogebrity Robert Scoble expressed a desire on his blog that some algorithmic genius develop a measure of engagement, or likeability, to better represent the impact of bloggers. He speaks from personal experience to illustrate the power of the online relationship: [...]
October 26th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
[...] This phenomenon is mirrored online. Blogebrity Robert Scoble expressed a desire on his blog that some algorithmic genius develop a measure of engagement, or likeability, to better represent the impact of bloggers. He speaks from personal experience to illustrate the power of the online relationship: [...]
October 26th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
[...] Over the past few days, Ze Frank and Andrew Baron have had a bit of a catfight over the actual viewers of Rocketboom. It began in Ze’s “the show” two days ago, and was quickly countered by Andrew Baron. The story was picked up in the blogosphere, and was covered by video blogging heavyweights like Robert Scoble. [...]
October 26th, 2006 at 7:38 pm
[...] This phenomenon is mirrored online. Blogebrity Robert Scoble expressed a desire on his blog that some algorithmic genius develop a measure of engagement, or likeability, to better represent the impact of bloggers. He speaks from personal experience to illustrate the power of the online relationship: [...]
October 27th, 2006 at 2:06 am
[...] This phenomenon is mirrored online. Blogebrity Robert Scoble expressed a desire on his blog that some algorithmic genius develop a measure of engagement, or likeability, to better represent the impact of bloggers. He speaks from personal experience to illustrate the power of the online relationship: [...]
October 27th, 2006 at 2:06 am
[...] This phenomenon is mirrored online. Blogebrity Robert Scoble expressed a desire on his blog that some algorithmic genius develop a measure of engagement, or likeability, to better represent the impact of bloggers. He speaks from personal experience to illustrate the power of the online relationship: [...]
October 27th, 2006 at 2:35 am
[...] Se lo chiede anche Scoble in questo post sull’engagement. [...]
October 27th, 2006 at 2:58 am
[...] Robert Scoble talks about engagement on the web, which measures the experience or habit of the user on the site, rather than in plain metric of page views and visitors. [...]
October 27th, 2006 at 4:07 am
[...] Some interesting discussion over the last couple of days about the necessity for a new kind of metric for measuring the effectiveness of blogs. Robert Scoble talks about the difference between getting page impressions (bad) and engagement (good): [...]
October 27th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
As someone who has worked in web metrics for the past four years, I can tell you all web metrics are flawed. I can go one further and say all off-line media metrics are flawed as well.
Metrics are a currency for valuing advertising and media properties. The only thing a metric needs to be is consistent and accepted as a unit of measure between the those selling and buying media properties and advertising.
That’s way easier said than done. Setting a metrics standard can put the thumb on the scale in favor of one player or another - Rocketboom or Zefrank.
A metric’s only good if it can be accepted as a medium of exchange.
This issue is something the web analytics association has been grappling with for a while.
http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/
Enrique
October 27th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
[...] What people get out of watching is an other key question. Jeane Sessum says there needs to be a likability metric and Robert Scoble says we need a way to measure engagement. [...]
October 27th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Robert - add to your equation “relevancy” which people seem to be forgetting. Even if your readers click on my link to Diva Marketing (engagement) they will not stay long, go deep or come back unless the content is relevant to them.
So while engagement is the first step relevancy is critical and should be integrated into any measurement model. Without it we are counting old fashioned ‘hits’ which may be great for the ego but from a business stance is a big So What.
October 27th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Why has nobody mentioned YouTube in this context yet? I know when I look at a video (before I hit PLAY) I see how many video responses it’s gotten, how many times favorited, how many comments, the star rating, etc, rather than just number of viewings.
They do an excellent job of articulating the degree of audience engagement for each and every video, I just wish there was some way to search for “most video responses” videos, etc.
October 28th, 2006 at 12:43 am
Hi Robert (and all other readers).
I’m the CEO of a NuConomy. You probably didn’t hear about us until now as we were in stealth mode until a few days ago.
Our offering is a platform for Internet sites that does just that - Gives you a sophisticated generic way to develop your own engagement formulas (we call it ranking for now.
By using our platform you can rank your users and learn more about your business, and then also run financial schemes upon the results (rewards programs, revenue sharing, etc…).
I would love to hear what you think about our offering (the good and the bad). Feel free to check out our web site or contact me directly in shahar at nuconomy.com
October 28th, 2006 at 7:15 am
[...] It’s been a theme of the week and today techcrunch is onto it in relation to Rocketboom and Ze Frank. Earlier in the week Robert Scoble addressed the issue of a new audience metric. [...]
October 29th, 2006 at 2:41 am
[...] 視聴者が番組にどういう印象をもつかがもうひとつの重要な問題だ。Jeane Sessum は視聴者の「好感度」を測る基準があっていいと主張している。Robert Scoble は「忠実度」の指標も測定される必要があるとしている。 [...]
October 29th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Security, Control, Trackability in Online Media Distribution
The Ze Frank vs. Rocketboom video blog popularity contest sparked a lot of chatter this past week on how to best measure the value of web-based media shows (podcasts / vlogs / vodcasts / whatever). Is it possible that Ze Frank’s shows are wo…
October 29th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
[...] Scoble and Israel cover this issue in Naked Conversations, and Robert Scoble recently posted about the issue of engagement as a result of traffic. [...]
October 29th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
[...] With all of the talk lately about the Ze Frank / Rocketboom numbers, I thought it would be helpful for us to jump in and talk about some of the stuff that we’ve been thinking about. [...]
October 29th, 2006 at 10:24 pm
It goes back to the whole idea of mind share that was so hot back in the dot-com era. A site can get a lot of hits, and you can interpret it as a measure of popularity and awareness of the brand. However, does it actually mean anything? Are users actually going to come back or even remember your site? The current system of measuring audience engagement is a throwback to older methods of measuring ratings, but better tools can now be deployed to more fully gauge what something means to an audience.
October 30th, 2006 at 4:21 am
[...] New audience metric needed: engagement « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger [...]
October 30th, 2006 at 5:02 am
The Danger of Communities
I was reading Robert Scoble’s post where he talked about the need to measure ‘engagement’ more than just hits or downloads and it made me think about Chill. You might be aware that i’ve helped out with Chill, it’s one of our new digital stations. …
October 31st, 2006 at 2:09 am
[...] Es ist kein Geheimnis, dass die Werbetreibenden immer mehr in Richtung Cost-per-Click oder Cost-per-Action Modelle tendieren. Mit ein Grund ist natürlich, dass die anderen Modelle sehr leicht manipuliert werden können bzw. sehr schwer zu messen sind. Während der Diskussion über die Reichweite von Rockeboom erlaubte Andrew Baron, der Produzenten von Rocketboom, verschiedenen Leuten die Severlogs von Rocketboom einzusehen (die Excel-Datei gibt es hier). Aus diesen Logfiles geht hervor, dass Rocketboom im Oktober durchschnittlich 211 000 komplette Downloads hatte. Nimmt man diese Zahlen hat Rocketboom einen CPM von $75 (die Werbung für eine Woche kostet $80 000). Soweit so gut, nur geht Baron leider davon aus, dass diese Downloads auch von 211 000 Zuschauern gesehen wurden und hier liegt der Fehler: Rocketboom hat einen Autoplay, ist in vielen Vodcasts Clients als Standard hinterlegt und wird von TiVos usw automatisch heruntergeladen. Zudem hat die BBC bei einem Experiment festgestellt, dass gerade einmal jeder zweite Download auch gesehen wird und nehmen wir das an halbiert sich das Publikum von Rocketboom und der CPM schießt auf $150. Die Werbetreibenden zahlen also für eine Reichweite, die sie in der Form gar nicht erhalten. Das heißt jedoch nicht, dass die Werbung bei Rocketboom die $80 000 nicht wert ist, sonder nur dass die Messung schlecht und ungeeignet ist. Nicht umsonst fordert Robert Scoble im Hinblick auf Videoblogs: New audience metric needed: engagement.Noch einfacher kann man die Problematik an Text Link Ads verdeutlichen, deren Link Worth Calculator nimmt als Basis der Berechnung das Alexa-Ranking. Hat man vor der Anmeldung ein wenig mit der Alexa-Toolbar gespielt sind die zu erwartenden Einnahmen um ein vielfaches höher als der eigentliche Wert der Links. [...]
November 3rd, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Greetings,
Actually, I have found Hitslinkt to be a useful tool. Your post in part inspired me to write this one for my blog.
I am happy this discussion is unfolding on this side of the World, rather than in the Marketing / Advertising side. Generally, it’s the reverse.
November 3rd, 2006 at 2:57 pm
[...] - Share what you learn with colleagues and network with people in other organisations who sit in seats like yours to identify new ways to calculate the benefits, costs and risks of blogging. Work with them to create a framework for measuring the ROI of your blogging efforts. Join the search for a new metric for engagement. [...]
November 8th, 2006 at 6:56 am
[...] “How do you measure engagement” on Robert Scoble’s blog: “I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. (…) Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.” [...]
November 8th, 2006 at 8:37 am
i got a free razr from this website and thought i would share :-)
November 13th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
[...] Scoble asked for some new KPIs around engagement, which just drives me nuts because engagement is not a new topic and not limited to “Web 2.0” – we’ve all (probably) been working on engagement a long time and there are KPIs available – I guess either they’re not special enough or “Web 2.0ers” don’t pay attention to web analytics *sigh*. [...]
November 20th, 2006 at 6:46 am
[...] Scobleizer - New audience metric needed: engagement： Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see. [...]
December 6th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
[...] Robert Scoble has talked about this effect in the past, comparing the traffic he gets from Digg.com to mainstream media sites like USA Today. Digg generates far more traffic than MSM. [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 9:55 am
[...] It seems like forever ago that Eric and I talked about engagement and how I expressed some frustration over Scoble’s post about the need for Engagement metrics. Haven’t we web analysts been talking about this like FOREVER (well maybe 18 months or so anyway). [...]
December 25th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
[...] Some experts even think we should find ways to measure engagement. Tech Evangelist Robert Scoble explains why: As an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale. [...]
December 27th, 2006 at 8:27 am
I wrote about this recently here. BuzzLogic sent a note after reading it, that they have built a complete suite that measures engagement and conversations.
January 10th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
[...] site provides. The 95+% of people who don’t convert must be doing something useful! There has been a good conversation about measuring “engagement” recently. Eric Peterson outlined [...]
January 15th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Hi! Very nice site! Thanks you very much! d0xsWxt2KW
January 19th, 2007 at 2:09 am
[...] Analytics Demystified has been running a series of articles on Engagement Metrics, as a response to Robert Scoble’s calling for “engagement metrics.” Based on discussions he has had with customers on building engagement metrics, Eric has outlined a [...]
January 25th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
[...] so much (enough to blog about it) is because time spent viewing a site is a far better metric for engagement than pageviews. I don’t know how accurately Compete can measure viewing time (in other words, [...]
January 29th, 2007 at 9:17 am
[...] But engagement was a key theme explored at the Future of Information Summit ‘07 presented by Experian recently. Last month, a Factiva roundtable reached to figure out how to measure social media the best way, and Robert Scoble (no less) had already added his call for a new metric for engagement. [...]
February 5th, 2007 at 9:48 am
[...] and more, our clients and readers have asked us to develop a better metric for measuring the performance of their web channels and [...]
March 3rd, 2007 at 11:13 pm
[...] friend Clint Ivy and I were talking awhile back and he asked me, “So what do you think about Scoble’s call for an engagement metric?” I said, “Huh?” since I had long since stopped reading Robert Scoble, but [...]
August 22nd, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Is the difficulty of measuring engagement inherent to the browser or the browser-based way we engage on the internet? It seems users need to be empowered in some way to measure their own level of engagement - but it needs to happen on the client side because so much of it is opaque to the server.
December 20th, 2007 at 1:55 am
[...] it is talked about a bunch of lost ad impressions on variety of online locations, in order to have achieved ad campaign results, Web site owners with [...]
January 24th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
[...] makes me think so. Though searching for the word turns up over 85 million results, there was a lone result on the first page that didn’t try to push a ring or wedding planning on me, it took me to page 9 [...]
April 20th, 2008 at 6:45 am
[...] (Robert Scoble, the ex-Microsoft “evangelist”) from 2006 entitled: New audience metrics needed: Engagement, lists, what engagement is about and what might be [...]