This is the third (but not final) post in the series on Visitor Engagement. One of the problems with the Visitor Scoring method that I previously described, is that, at the end of the day, you’re still somewhat limited to viewing scores at the “average” level, by segment. That presents a number of challenges because the average is precisely that…and the underlying scores vary dramatically within each segment. But there is a way to see what each and every visitor score is, or even within the different segments…and it’s called the Unique Visitor ID. You can see at the visitor level, how many times they’ve returned, how many “things” they’ve done, such as searches, product views, revenue etc. This is really the icing on the proverbial cake.

This is a follow on post to my previous one about measuring that elusive engagement. This post focuses on the aspect of applying a score to visitor interactions, as they interact with your content and applications. Visitor scoring is fairly simple – especially in SiteCatalyst, and by leveraging the data in Discover through segmentation, (and ultimately in SiteCatalyst 15), it’ll give you even more insight into visitor engagement. Visitor scoring measures and assigns a relative value to individual customers and prospects based on their actions and behaviors over time. You can determine intent and engagement – even before visitors convert. Once you’ve identified your most valuable visitors, you can dissect their actions to determine the campaigns, keywords, referring sites and offline touch points that engage them – and invest more on these efforts.

Figuring out who your engaged visitors are, can be quite the challenge. The problem is, there is no straightforward answer, and there certainly isn't a single metric to define it. Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction against a set of clearly defined goals - Eric T. Peterson (Web Analytics Demystified) As the previous statement suggests, the reality of it is that engagement comes from a number of different criteria.

Now, there’s a hot topic. Measuring engagement. One of the most widely debated topics in web analytics. What is engagement and how do we measure it? Engagement, unfortunately, is not derived from a single measure. It’s not time on site. It’s not how many pages they viewed. It’s not bounce rates and it’s not about conversions. Engagement is about a lot of things. What is an engaged visitor and how do you measure engagement?

It’s campaign time again. Normally we behaviorally target content to users based on their application stage. We know from previous tests that this provides more relevance to the user when they visit our site – instead of just seeing a standard campaign message each time. And relevance is proven to lift conversions.