Finding Meaning in Engagement Metrics

Posted by: Matt Shanahan

I am never surprised when someone says they measure subscriber loyalty only to learn they are really measuring engagement. How and why a subscriber engages can be a loyalty driver, and understanding these drivers can help paid-content providers create loyalty programs.

When it comes to measuring engagement, it’s hard to argue with the approach of measuring everything. The incremental cost of collecting three or three-dozen quantitative measures is negligible. Why not have duration and frequency of visit, click-through rate, bookmark data, RSS subscriptions, downloads and blog comments metrics available at your fingertips?

My view gets a bit more controversial when we start talking about how to derive meaning from all the engagement data points that are collected. The general model today is to sift through the data points and, based on instinct and/or experience, determine what knob to dial up or down. An organization might create a feature that helps improves content resyndication, roll out a program that increases downloads, or create a promotion that increases repeat visits. All are fine ideas, but they are mostly guesses, and the approach is often shotgun.

I find it fascinating that all of these objective analytics are translated into activity through a mainly subjective lens. Call me a stickler, but it seems we need an approach these analytics in a way that’s, well, a bit more analytical.

What’s missing is a quantitative platform for comparison—a normalized metric for figuring out which engagement metrics matter. That’s where subscriber loyalty comes in. Once you have a quantitative way of understanding the subscriber loyalty, the engagement metrics come alive. Demand Rating™ is our metric for subscriber loyalty. It enables organizations to rank subscribers and group them into comparables sets to investigate differences.

For example, you can group subscribers with high loyalty scores and then compare their engagement metrics to those with low loyalty scores. The delta between these groups will offer insight into engagement metrics that drive loyalty. Or, you might compare loyalty across segments —maybe geographical, organizational, or firmographic—to understand which engagement metrics are important to that particular segment.

As you can see, engagement metrics are loyalty metrics, but they can be highly correlated to each other. Further, loyalty metrics quell a lot of controversy about engagement metrics because it’s the key for quantifying contribution of each engagement metric.