One hot topic in the measurement community has been “engagement” and how to measure it. If you can get at how involved your community is with your site, you can get a good handle on whether you’re serving them well. For any community site, growth in returning visitors is usually a good thing, especially if your other numbers show that you’re reaching the right community.
But what other measures are best: Time spent on site? Page views per visit? Referring sites? It depends. Here are a few examples to help you get a handle on ways to measure engagement:
Scenario 1: User-Generated Video Site.
Let’s say you have a site with a user-submitted video page that gets lots of traffic, but the videos are all displayed on one page, under a single URL. For you, the measure is how popular that single page is, and how much time is spent on it per visit, rather than the number of separate page views per visit.
Scenario 2: Individual User-Generated Pages.
If your site includes separate pages of short user submissions that aren’t aggregated under a single URL, a measure of engagement will be page views per visit as people click through to view more and more content, rather than focusing on time spent on a single page.
Scenario 3: Blogging Site.
Let’s say your site has a lot of blogs, and much of your traffic comes from search engines. Your Web analytics package can identify the search terms that bring people in. Are they the kinds of terms specific to your community, indicating people are looking for just what you provide? For example, if you’re a community site popular with hunters in Wyoming, are people searching with phrases like “hunting Wyoming” or much more generic terms like “rifle?”
Beyond the Site: Syndicate
Online success is about more than your site. People interact with online content in many ways, such as through e-mail alerts, RSS feed readers, social media (like Facebook, del.icio.us, Digg, and Twitter), and mobile media (SMS alerts or the mobile Web).
To improve your reach, it helps to give people as many ways to access your content as possible. In particular, RSS feeds, e-mail alerts, mobile alerts, and some kinds of social media are very popular and can vastly expand your audience. Don’t forget to take these outlets’ usage into account when calculating your total audience. Here are some key tools to do so:
Headline Tracking Codes: You may have seen a URL (Web address) in your browser when you’ve clicked from an e-mail link that included something like “?c=nm07grp” at the end. That bit after the question mark is a “campaign code” that tells analytics software the URL was landed on from that e-mail link. Most analytics packages tell you how to use the codes, which will tell you what’s getting good click-through to your site.
Feedburner.com is a popular free service that helps you install, optimize and monitor use of RSS feeds. You can track how many people subscribe to your feed, which is an indication of how much people want to bring your content into their personal feed reader.
Feedblitz.com is another popular free service that generates e-mail alerts automatically from your RSS feed and tells you how many have subscribed through it.