Back in 2015, I wrote a post about using Calculated Metrics to create an Engagement Score. In that post, I mentioned that it was possible to pick a series of success events and multiply them by some sort of weighted number to compute an overall website engagement score. This was an alternative to a different method of tracking visitor engagement via numeric success events set via JavaScript (which was also described in the post). However, given that Adobe has added the cool Approximate Count Distinct function to the analytics product, I recently had an idea about a different way to compute website engagement that I thought I would share.

Adding Depth to Website Engagement

In my previous post, website engagement was computed simply by multiplying chosen success events by a weighted multiplier like this:

This approach is workable but lacks a depth component. For example, the first parameter looks at how many Product Views take place but doesn’t account for how many different products are viewed. There may be a situation in which you want to assign more website engagement to visits that get visitors to view multiple products vs. just one. The same concept could apply to Page Views and Page Names, Video Views and Video Names, etc…

Using the Approximate Count Distinct function, it is now possible to add a depth component to the website engagement formula. To see how this might work, let’s go through an example. Imagine that in a very basic website engagement model, you want to look at Blog Post Views and Internal Searches occurring on your website. You have success events for both Blog Post Views and Internal Searches and you also have eVars that capture the Blog Post Titles and Internal Search Keywords.

To start, you can use the Approximate Count Distinct function to calculate how many unique Blog Post Titles exist (for the chosen date range) using this formula:

Next, you can multiply the number of Blog Post Views by the number of unique Blog Post Titles to come up with a Blog Post Engagement score as shown here:

Note that since the Approximate Count Distinct function is not 100% accurate, the numbers will differ slightly from what you would get if you use a calculator, but in general, the function will be at least 95% accurate or greater.

You can repeat this process for Internal Search Keywords. First, you compute the Approximate Count of unique Search Keywords like this:

Then you create a new calculated metric that multiplies the number of Internal Searches by the unique number of Keywords. Here is what a report looks like with all six metrics:

Website Engagement Calculation

Now that you have created the building blocks for your simplistic website engagement score, it is time to put them together and add some weighting. Weighting is important, because it is unlikely that your individual elements will have the same importance to your website. In this case, let’s imagine that a Blog Post View is much more important than an Internal Search, so it is assigned a weight score of 90, whereas a score of 10 is assigned to Internal Searches. If you are creating your own engagement score, you may have more elements and can weight them as you see fit.

In the following formula, you can see that I am adding the Blog Post engagement score to the Internal Search engagement score and adding the 90/10 weighting all in one formula. I am also dividing the entire formula by Visits to normalize it, so my engagement score doesn’t rise or fall based upon differing number of Visits over time:

Here you can see a version of the engagement score as a raw number (multiplied by 90 & 10) and then the final one that is divided by Visits:

Finally, you can plot the engagement score in a trended bar chart. In this case, I am trending both the engagement score and visits in the same chart:

In the end, this engagement score calculation isn’t significantly different than the original one, but adding the Approximate Count Distinct function allows you to add some more depth to the overall calculation If you don’t want to multiply the number of success event instances by ALL of the unique count of values, you could alternatively use an IF function with the GREATER THAN function to cap the number of unique items at a certain amount (i.e. If more than 50 unique Blog Post Titles, use 50, else, use the unique count).

The best part of this approach is that it requires no JavaScript tagging (assuming you already have the success events and eVars you need in the calculation). So you can play around with the formula and its weightings with no fear of negatively impacting your implementation and no IT resources! I suggest that you give it a try and see if this type of engagement score can be used as an overall health gauge of how your website is performing over time.