Measuring Engagement

We've all had discussions over the years about what our site statistics really mean and how measuring quality is equally or perhaps more important than measuring quantity.

Social media bring a new nuance to the qualitative vs. quantitative conversation which is: how do you measure engagement?

There are obvious qualitative measures such as length of visit on a site, and bounce rate, number of comments per article, number of emails to a friend, number of Diggs and so on.

Setting a target of increasing length of visit by a certain amount over a period of time seems like a logical place to start. Media organizations can take various routes to achieve that goal. Information might be higher quality, and more original. Stories need to have genuinely original material and links to related information that are useful to the visitor, not just more stuff a media company wants to promote.

Engagement is the way to increase the length of your site visits, whether by making material more engaging, or engaging visitors in some sort of interaction. So focus on engagement and you could improve your length of visit, a measurable parameter, and increase your audience's appreciation of your work. That's harder to measure but will pay dividends in the long run.

Here's an article from DJ Francis, who outlines five reasons for investing in social media in a post on ReadWriteWeb.com.

But we're still missing coherent ways to measure engagement success.