Customer Engagement Trumps Page Views
Nielsen/NetRatings announced yesterday that it will scrap its longtime industry measurement of online page views for how long visitors spend on Web sites.
Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, the company will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors, and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.
Why is this significant? The move demonstrates how page views are becoming less effective means to gauge a Web site's popularity amidst the growing use of audio and video and that audience engagement is a more robust metric for a Web site’s success. More companies are moving toward the human side of business—appealing to customers' emotions and interests to get customers on the sites and to keep them connected.
I spoke yesterday with Carley Roney, cofounder of the popular wedding Web site The Knot, who with her partner and husband David Liu, has built the site into the biggest online wedding destination. That’s largely because the site provides a breadth of content and appeals to a woman’s particular life stage. Visitors engage in personal experiences on the site, become connected, and often stay loyal long after their nuptials.
The strategy, Roney says, is rather than build the site around advertisers, they’ve built it around the audience. “On the Internet, people will not click if you don’t make it something that’s interesting to them or speaks to them. On the Internet we’re responsible for every piece of behavior of our audience,” she said.
Is your Web site engaging with customers? Are you the go-to source for information in your industry? Are you offering rich media as a way for customers to interact and communicate? Are you engaging your customers in product development and asking their opinions? Are you active in building customer communities on your site?
If you answered "no" to all of them, then it's time to take a fresh look.
The points that Ron and Robert bring up are good ones.
No, one size does not fit all, which is why it's even more important for companies to make sure (and advertisers to request) the KPI's and metrics that "fit" each web site depending on it's purpose.
Notice I said KPI's/metrics - as in plural. It's not enough to rely on one metric - stake holders need a bevvy of metrics (time spent, RSS subscribers, trackbacks, etc. ) sewn together in order to get a complete picture of what's working and what's not.
We're advised not to put our "eggs in one basket" when investing, the same goes for metrics...relying on just one main metric will never let you see the correlations.
Relying on one metric makes it much harder to forecast.
-Lena West
http://www.xynoMedia.com
WHAT ENGAGES A WEB SITE VISITOR MOST?
Nielsen/Net Ratings just announced that it now measures website popularity by how much time users spend on sites, rather than how many pages they view. The new measure overturns their previous rankings, so now Yahoo and AOL lead the traditional “winner,” Google.
We view this as a particularly idiosyncratic shift because it seems far less to do with actually measuring engagement and much more a reaction to technological changes within the medium itself.
Because web sites now incorporate online video, streaming data, and self-refreshing page content, it makes “page views” somewhat superfluous, so you need to change. Measuring total “time spent” is certainly infinitely easier, and is a seductive measure, but it doesn’t really provide any real measure of users’ “engagement” with the sites.
In a more complex media environment, with more complex (and clever) consumers, it’s worth remembering that there is a difference between something being “popular” and something being “engaging.” The Super Bowl is extraordinarily popular, but as history has proven, not all advertisers achieve equivalent levels of engagement just because they place their ads on it! Consumers might spend 15 minutes on YouTube, and 30 seconds on Google, but the raison d’être for the visit is entirely different (as are the values and expectations that will – or will not – engage the consumer) and, therefore, the engagement “yardstick” you rely upon must also be different. On the web one size does not fill all. That approach may be simple, but it’s not precise.
Brand Keys defines engagement as “the consequence of a marketing or communication effort that results in an increased level of brand equity for the product or service,” and a variety of validity tests and independent, professional reviews have proven the efficacy and in-market legitimacy, as well as the utility of this definition, so the use of the term as Nielsen defined it, surprised us.
On the basis of our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index we identified the following engagement rankings for the following search sites we monitor:
1. Google.com/Yahoo.com (tie)
2. Netscape.com
3. MSN.com
4. AOL.com
5. AltaVista.com/HotBot.com (tie)
6. Lycos.com
7. Excite.com
8. AskJeeves.com
9. NorthernLight.com
And, given the high correlation between these engagement measures and positive consumer behavior, to a certain degree our approach and measures obviate the “time spent” variable anyway.
To be sure, the “time spent” measure has been exceptionally useful when one is talking about media allocation, but as conventional studies of traditional and new media have proven, there is little correlation with “time spent” and real engagement. You can call a Chihuahua a “Greyhound,” but it doesn’t make it so!
The Brand Keys definition of “engagement” takes into account that web sites exist within different competitive landscapes, albeit digital ones. You must examine social networking sites in a vastly different manner than you do search sites. The drivers and values for them are not only different but are often divergent. You really can’t compare MySpace with Google just because they both happen to be sites on the World Wide Web.
Sheryl Draizen of the Interactive Advertising Bureau has noted that Nielsen’s engagement methodology isn’t definitive and that there are other methods to explore. We agree. Nielsen’s approach is simple. But simplicity should not be the goal. Simplicity is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations. These days both marketers and consumers expect more!
While finding a metric besides page views is a great idea, the new N/NR metric isn't much of an improvement. Here's just two reasons:
1) I read this blog every day. In a feed reader. I'm self-admittedly "very engaged" -- but not according to N/NR.
2) There may be demographic factors -- age primarily, but perhaps education, income, geography, ethnic background, etc. -- that influence how long someone spends on a Web site. The metric therefore doesn't really capture engagement.
There are plenty of more reasons why N/NR's new metric doesn't really measure customer engagement. But I'm afraid if I spend any more time on the site, N/NR will think I'm engaged.