Part IV in Series on Measuring Engagement
When working with some of our largest clients to quantify the value of their sites, I found myself repeatedly evaluating sites whose primary function business owners described as "branding." Since they'd spent money (often quite a bit) building and maintaining these sites, they not unreasonably wanted to know what their value was.
It's a tough question but not a foolish one.
Why should we care about brand value? I know that most direct marketers and many online marketers have a deep skepticism about brand marketing - viewing it as little more than an excuse to forgo any measurability.
It certainly can be that. But I am not in that philosophical camp. I don't question that "brand" marketing is both real and potentially very effective; nor do I doubt that "brand" is something real - albeit something difficult to measure.
Every customer interaction a company has is part of building a brand. Human interactions are uniquely powerful of course. One rude employee can ruin your brand for someone. A genuinely helpful one can cement a brand relationship for years. But advertising, ATMs, web sites, bills, statements - they all matter.
It's hard to say where the web site fits into this - and every reason to believe that it varies quite a bit from industry to industry and customer to customer. For Google, the web site just is the brand. For P&G it's quite a bit less. For a bank or an online brokerage it's a huge part of the everyday experience of the company. For an airline it's merely a significant piece.
But can any of this be measured?
In a way I think it can - but only indirectly. We all know that behavioral data has fundamental limitations in what it tells us about a visitor's motivations and attitudes. It's probably unreasonable to think that a purely behavioral analysis can, on its own, quantify brand value.
On the other hand, there is no simple way to quantify such things in any other channel or medium. What is the value of "friendliness" training for airline employees? Or wine instruction for waiters? These aren't easy questions to answer either.
I suspect that the only real method for measuring "brand" value will involve significant primary research using fairly traditional techniques. But part of that primary research needs to be tied to online behavior so that the true impact of differential levels of web site interaction can be assessed.
This is a topic I'm going to take up in more detail when I discuss visitor segmentation strategies (in the near future). But it seems likely to me that when you make that tie between changes in assessed "brand" awareness and satisfaction and differential uses of the online properties, you will be using a concept that looks remarkably similar to engagement. However, that concept will be neither a proxy for success (at least not in the sense in which I used the term originally) nor a measure of media-buying.
Presumably, differing levels of accomplishment will deliver a different brand value. For most sites, the longer you spend on the site, the higher the likely brand impression (this might even be true for Google). For most sites, the more pages you consume, the higher the likely brand impression. For most sites, the more interactive you are with the site, the higher the likely brand impression.
Why isn't this brand engagement concept the same as a proxy for success? It can be, but where the site has other functions besides branding, the relationship breaks down. In my lead gen example from the first post on this topic, if you are using engagement as a proxy for success, then you have to take the value of that success into account. Since one lead-type may be sourcing much more valuable customers, the proxy must weight that lead higher or it won't be an appropriate tool for optimization.
This simply isn't the same thing as the strength of the brand impression. It's perfectly possible that between two types of lead gen opportunities one is more valuable and the other creates a deeper brand impression. In branding, engagement is serving as a proxy - but the proxy is to a psychological state not a site success.
Although this measurement of brand impact is undoubtedly going to be different for every site (and certainly every industry), I see some promise and use for a standardized measure of engagement that is common across sites.
Many site owners would like very much to be able to account (and take credit for) the brand value they deliver. We know, intuitively, that they do in fact deliver this value. We simply lack an accepted framework for claiming it.
The difficulties involved in doing the primary research and building this analysis make it prohibitive for every company to study. So I think it likely that if a few companies where this problem is especially important lead the way, most other companies will simply accept their framework. This is never ideal, but it is a common practice in a great deal of market research where the barriers and costs to doing customized analysis are significant.
Summing Up
To discuss any issue usefully, you have to know what sort of thing you are really talking about. That just hasn't been the case in a great deal of web analytics thinking about engagement; the discussion has been much too liberal in the assumption that we "all know what we are talking about." By segregating out these three distinct uses (and I'm pretty satisfied with Eric's naming convention) and giving each a "Term-of-Art" we actually do achieve an improvement in clarity.
We often criticize disciplines for having specialized vocabularies. But while specialized vocabularies can be excessive and misused, they exist for a reason. Just as the Eskimo needs many words for snow, we - as web analytic practitioners - need more than one word for engagement.
This is an awfully long prelude to what will probably be 10 minutes of talking at eMetrics. I do feel like these posts have helped me clarify my own thinking in preparation for that talk. And I'm starting to look forward to the eMetrics discussion and finding out how all of this fits into the work Eric and Joseph are doing. As I usually say at the end of my podcasts, talk to you then!
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