More Engagment - the counter argument

It seems Avinash stirred up a lot of controversy with his post on engagement (see Sunday's post). In a series of thoughtful comment I want to highlight Gary Angels response, which is leading the pack in terms of clarity among analytics experts that defend "Engagement" as a metric. I especially like what Gary responds to Avinash's last point. He says:

• Engagement isn’t a proxy for measuring an outcome on a site at all. It’s more often a means of aggregating a set of outcomes into a single visitor score or segment. Since a set of outcomes can’t reasonably be described by just appending all of the events into one long name, the analyst is always going to have to pick a name that reasonably represents the overall concept. In many situations, and for many sites, “Engagement” does a pretty good job of carrying that baggage

My conclusion is that measuring Engagement can be an effective tool in the web analytics toolbox. But like every tool, it can used for good and bad purposes (much like nuclear energy, I guess). In order to use Engagement effectively we need to be aware of certain preconditions and caveats.

• Engagement is not a standard metrics that is the same for every company, or even every campaign of one company, which often makes it difficult to compare and improve on it over time.
• Engagement should never be an excuse not to define, track and analyze specific outcomes of a page. Without a clearly defined objective and target action a landing page has no value.
• What Engagement can do however, is summarize a set of outcomes (e.g. Video played, PDF downloaded, link clicked) and the compare this set of outcomes across different visitor segments (e.g. search vs. banner ads, media A vs. Media B, Landing Page A vs. Landing Page B). This can lead to valuable conclusions and actions.

Now the main challenge for non e-commerce sites is to prove beyond doubt, that a higher engagement leads to a better, faster or less expensive achievement of the objective. That again is very unique across companies and will often involve additional surveys.