Analyzing Engagement Metrics

By: Tessa Rudd

Editor-in-Chief

Chitika | Pulse

a weekly data analysis medium for the online marketing industry

Issue XIV
Chitika | Pulse Archive

When it comes to branding in Web 2.0; a conversation is worth a thousand clicks; and you can quote me on this.

Traditional metrics including clicks, impressions, and conversion to sale data have been instrumental in improving the accountability of effective online marketing. Evaluating the ROI of marketing initiatives in today’s next generation Web 2.0, however, can no longer be measured through these metrics alone, as reliable and quantifiable as they may be. We here at Chitika are devoted in our efforts to help further improve the accountability of online marketing in Web 2.0, today’s social media terrain, along with meeting the ROI requirements of online marketers who represent offline, brick and mortar, commerce. We are thereby thrilled to introduce our new user engagement metric, constructed specifically to measure brand marketing in social media. Let me tell you a little more about it…

The internet has radically changed the world of marketing; extending the reach of marketing initiatives and therefore increasing the number of potential customers by removing geography as a limiting factor. Internet marketing accountability, however, has been notoriously questioned. Google’s own Eric Schmidt submits that “corporate marketing is the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America.” Schmidt and Google set-off to change this; and the billions of dollars that advertisers are eagerly stuffing into Google’s pockets, prove that they have achieved this.

Social media marketing tools are valuable.
According to a Marketing VOX report released this month, internet marketers view blogs and online video as the most popular forms of social media. The report indicates that 78% of marketers are using blogs, and 63% are using video.

Internet marketers responding to this study showed an overall high satisfaction level with social media tools. This is considerable as the study also indicates that only 51% of marketers report actually measuring the success of their respective social media initiatives.

So what criteria should we value?
The study specifies that the most important criteria driving these marketer’s high satisfaction level with social media tools is the prospect of communicating with the web’s “new influencers” or leaders of Web 2.0 conversations. Chitika has long contended that reaching influencers or efluencers is critical in communicating with, as well as building lasting relationships with, key target audiences.
With that said, while brand marketing strategies are valued as being effective, they also offer less tangible forms of measurement.

Conversational brand marketing can be broken down into three important facets:
1. In recent pulse reports I have discussed the importance of conversational brand marketing strategies in amplifying advertising messages into new web conversations: Entering Web 2.0 conversations is critical for reaching consumers.
2. The ability to properly target Web 2.0 audiences, or enter the right conversation, is both an advantage to conversational brand marketing but is also a “sink or swim” variable. If an advertising message is pushed into the wrong conversation, the message will not have any influence and web users will not engage with it.
3. Like any marketing initiative, the effectiveness, or ROI, of conversational brand marketing strategies must be properly evaluated for campaign optimization. Generating and analyzing the correct metrics is, and will be, an ongoing battle. I contend that the more fragmented the online media, or social media, terrain becomes, the more new metrics, and fashions of analysis, will emerge.

In this world of Web 2.0 marketing, Chitika, as an online social media and blog ad network, is nicely positioned to have the ability to explore and test the effectiveness of different metrics for measuring conversational brand marketing initiatives. We are devoted in our efforts to help battle Schmidt’s grim corporate marketing outlook.

In analyzing our recent Chitika | VBU campaign, powered by the brand mimoco, we successfully achieved some headway when it comes to bringing accountability to online marketing.

Evaluation of the Chitika | VBU’s conversational components allow for measurement of engagement as a metric. Chitika’s engagement metric is the sum total of all interactions with the ad unit, or VBU, including interactive modules; “rate it”, “comment”, “share it”, combined with the age-old measurement of clicks.

The last issue of Chitika | Pulse discussed the importance of qualitative data, namely negative feedback, in effective online campaign optimization through targeting. Content compiled from the VBU’s conversational modules, especially “comment” module, offers succinct qualitative feedback (i.e.; we love mimobots!). A more universal and quantifiable metric, however, would be the number of user interactions with these comprising modules that the ad unit generated; i.e., the number of comments, ratings, or times shared. User engagement data, as a metric, should be evaluated in addition to the standard reach and frequency metric, to capture the sum total of all interactions with the ad unit.

Engagement data is fundamental in analyzing the extent to which consumers interact with a brand/advertising message while in Web 2.0 conversations. Analyzing engagement data quantifiably–along with the noted merits of evaluating qualitative data– will allow for more universal campaign analysis, especially in the ability to gage conversational brand marketing campaign success against traditional online marketing metrics, including lead generation (CPC) and conversion to sale data (CPA).

Chitika’s case study, outlining the success of our recent conversational brand marketing specific campaign, powered by Chitika | VBU, and featuring advertiser mimoco, valued engagement as principal metric. Over the campaign’s seven day run, data shows a 54% increase in engagement rate, which in this particular campaign was measured by post-video media consumption in the ad unit (including; “comments”, “rating”, “sharing”, and video play clicks) when compared to clicks in the VBU (leading to the merchant site) alone.

About Chitika | Pulse

Chitika | Pulse is a weekly publication that highlights emerging trends in online advertising and merchandising in the blogosphere.

By offering a succinct analysis of online consumer behavior in Chitika’s network, Chitika | Pulse exclusively correlates trends to address a wide range of topics related to online branding, e-commerce, retail in the long tail, and direct merchandising within the blogosphere and social networks.

By Tessa Rudd, Account Executive - Advertising Media Division