Make 2009 the year for engagement analytics

Which resolutions have you made about your online marketing in 2009?

With less budget available for investment in media in many organizations in 2009, it makes sense to resolve to engage more of the visitors you attract to your site. Improving on-site engagement is a worthwhile area to focus on which requires relatively limited expenditure.

With Google Analytics freely available to all businesses to help them review and improve engagement, you should look at whether you are really getting the most from your site statistics.

In next months column, I will give specific advice on how you should configure Google Analytics to get the most from it. Google Analytics provides great insights from the moment you "install the Google tracking tags":http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66983 , but specific configuration to setup the site to track performance for your own business will give you greater insights on where to focus your efforts.

In this months column, I will take a top-level view of online engagement and the different aspects of engagement you can be measuring.

What is online customer engagement?
Customer engagement is often front-of-mind for me since I work as a consultant in the Customer Engagement Unit at agency cScape.

We have recently released our "annual Customer Engagement report for 2009":http://www.cscape.com/services/Pages/CustomerEngagement.aspx . In it, my colleague Richard Sedley defines engagement as:

"Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand.”

This is a great definition since it is succinct, but shows that online customer engagement involves much more than an immediate conversion based on functional design of a site, instead online engagement involves:

• A series of interactions as visitors return to a site prompted by different offline and traditional media;
• Stimulating continued interactions after an initial transaction such as lead, sale or registration, to involve customers with a brand, often through direct communications like email and direct marketing as well as site features which will attract return visits such as community, offers or valuable content;
• Influencing, measuring and analyzing softer emotional measures as well as the number and type of interaction

So what is engagement analytics?
It follows from the definition that engagement analytics is about improving results from your online marketing by measuring how engaged your online audience is with your brand.

Different categories of engagement analytics measures
Which measures of engagement should you be looking at within your web analytics system such as Google Analytics?

Here are my thoughts on some of the most important categories of Engagement Analytics companies should consider drilling-down into their site statistics using Google Analytics:

1. Conversion analytics – Some site visits are more valuable than others depending on which pages your audience visits. In Google Analytics you should setup Conversion goal pages to review how many people engage and which media have converted. More on how to create conversion goals next month. If you have several steps to conversion, these should be configured as a conversion funnel to determine where the drop-outs are.

2. Page engagement analytics – Visitors will enter a site on many different pages from many different sources.

Use Google Analytics to find out which pages are engaging your audience and which aren't by looking at your top entry combined with page duration and bounce rate.

Bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors to a page who leave immediately through clicking the back button, searching again or going directly to another site. If your bounce rate for a popular entry page is over 50%, this should set the alarm bells ringing since the page just isn't engaging.

High bounce rates are a particular concern if you are paying for visitors through paid search since these are all wasted clicks and may suggest poor targeting.

3. Customer journey or clickstream analytics – engaged site visitors may visit several pages before they convert. Use reverse path analysis from a conversion goal page to find out which pages and customer journeys are effective in influencing conversion. Use forward path analysis to find out where visitors drop out of the site.

4. Campaign analytics – Some media used to drive visitors to your site will give higher quality traffic which engages your audience better. With a default installation you can readily see which searches drive visitors to your site from different search engines and the balance between paid search and natural traffic from your search engine optimization (SEO).

What you can't see so clearly is how other forms of promotion such as advertising and email marketing are influencing engagement. This requires additional coding of links as I will explain next month.

You should also think about how well you track the "influence of offline media as explained in this post by Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik":http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/12/multichannel-analytics-tracking-online-impact-offline-campaigns.html .

5. On-site search analytics – Web users love to search as we know from the popularity of search engines, so many will also use a search engine on your site, provided it is prominent enough. Google Analytics now has improved functions which will show searches performed, where searches are successful and more importantly where they fail returning zero results, so requiring improvement.

6. Intention-satisfaction analytics. Finally, remember that Google analytics can be used to infer a lot about visitor behaviour and how it is influenced by your web marketing.

But it can't tell you what your visitors thinks about your site and whether they are satisfied with the experience. You will need to ask visitors directly through survey research to get this information. While many companies will ask for general opinions from survey tools such as "Survey Monkey":http://www.surveymonkey.com , these often aren't focused enough.

Better to focus on these 4 questions which can be answered using a free tool from 4Q / iPerceptions:

• How satisfied are my visitors?
• What are my visitors onsite to do?
• Are they completing what they set out to do?
• If not why not – what are their opinions on the experience?

Try the free tool at the 4Q iPerceptions site":http://4q.iperceptions.com .

Well I hope this article has prompted some ideas - all the best for improving your online measurement and results in 2009!

About the author
Dr. Dave Chaffey, is the Director and lead consultant for
Marketing Insights Ltd , an independent digital marketing consultancy. He is the best selling author of several Internet Marketing Books used by digital marketing professionals and on many University and College Courses globally. His latest book, Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, now in its 4th edition, was published in January 2009.