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In the last weeks two things happened that make me think of how we segment visitors, measure engagement and how it contributes to a web’s porpoise or revenue.

1. Eric Peterson wrote an article on audience engagement, explaining his work with comScore, which made me revisit his paper on visitor engagement.
2. Google Analytics released a new feature, Advanced Segments.

The paper proposes a formula for visitor’s engagement that considers several components

As I posted before I wasn’t quite comfortable with the proposal and after some thoughts I finally realized why. The main two reasons are:

1. It puts all in the blender (weighted average of factors)
2. It mixes conversion, “the holy grail of engagement”, with the other terms

I proposed an alternative approach to analyze your visitors engagement that consider three axes Awareness, Amusement & Addiction each of them is build from factors considered in the original paper. Each of these segment can be computed using GA’s Advanced Segments feature, as well as the intersection of any two and the three segments.

Aware visits:

Visits that find your site through brand keywords or write your site’s URL directly on the browser or click on your loyalty campaigns (newsletters, subscribed RSS feeds), shortly visits that already know or are Aware of your site and brand.

Amused visits:

Visits that take their time on your site, that are interested and Amused by your content and product offer. The advanced segment is defined as visits how viewed at least a certain number of page views and spend at least a certain amount of seconds on your site.

Addicted visits:

This segment traces visits from users that come regularly to your site or are Addicted to it by specifying a minimum amount of visits and a threshold on the visit’s recency (the day since the last visit).

Using the advanced segment feature we can know the contribution of each segment (Aware, Amused & Addicted) to visits, page views, conversions and revenue allowing us to understand our audience distribution and which visitors segments are driving revenue.

Additionally since we are using 3 segments we can actually plot the overlaps using venn diagrams for any metrics we choose (visits, page views, conversions & revenue).

Venn diagram for all 3 segments visits and overlapping.

I really like this analysis because it allows you to see which traffic is driving the most conversion (separating conversion from engagement). Additionally you could have three levels and different flavor of engagement. Visitor on visits that match aware and addicted but not amused, visits that match all three criteria and so on.