Track Visitor Engagement using Google Analytics!
One of the major complaints about my work on measures of Visitor and Audience Engagement is that unless you have Visual Site (= Omniture on Premise), Unica, Coremetrics, SAS, or a custom data warehouse solution you’re somewhat limited in your ability to make the calculation. Now, thanks to the recent upgrade to Google Analytics and the availability of session-level segmentation everyone can use my calculation to explore engagement patterns on their site.
Yep, free measures of Visitor Engagement from Analytics Demystified and Google Analytics!
It was a post from Alec Cochrane about engagement that got me thinking about the application of my calculation using Google’s segmentation features, thanks Alec! Heck, had I been paying more attention to his blog I would have noticed that even Avinask Kaushik (who persists in his dogmatic assertion that “engagement cannot be measured”) refers to GA’s ability to make the calculation.
Keep in mind, what I’m describing in this post is not a full-blown measure of Visitor Engagement for a lot of reasons. Still, as I’m kicking it around it appears to be a pretty good start and per my entire approach towards measures of engagement, I’d rather have all of you banging on the idea than work in a vacuum.
So how does it work?
Step 1: Gather Your Threshold Values
The first step is to determine what thresholds you want to set for your Click-Depth, Duration, Recency, and Loyalty indices. You can get the first two from GA’s Visitors > Overview report (shown at right) while Recency and Loyalty come from Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Recency and Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Loyalty respectively.
Depending on your site you may need to be creative in how you set the Loyalty and Recency thresholds, especially since GA’s reporting on these measures is not super robust. Fortunately, since the segmentation tool is pretty flexible you can play with the threshold values once you’ve set them.
Step 2: Create Your Engaged Visitors Segment
The next step is to create a segment that lets you identify “engaged” visitors on your site. I’ll first describe the basic calculation, which is essentially the same as Audience Engagement only applied to click-stream data, and then expand in a follow-up post on the idea leveraging the Interaction Index, the Brand Index, and the Feedback Index.
Start by “creating a new custom segment” and adding the visitor dimension “Page Depth” (Google Analytics’s measure of Click-Depth during the session) setting the condition to “Greater than or equal to” the Click-Depth threshold value you discovered in Step 1:
Make sure to test the segment and confirm that things are working. In the example above you can see that about 25% of the sessions to my site last May were of at least three page views. Next you’re going to add the Duration Index by adding an “and” statement and dragging in the visitor dimension for “Visit Duration” and setting the condition to “Greater than or equal to” the time on site threshold determined in step 1:
Because you’re using an “and” statement we are getting the number of sessions that were both at least three page views and at least three minutes in duration; while this is imperfect compared to the visitor by session scoring strategy we described in the longer white paper the use of “and” ensures that we’re identifying visitors who are paying Attention as measured by clicks and session duration.
The next step is to roll in the Loyalty and Recency indices using the visitor dimensions “Count of Visits” and “Days Since Last Visit”. As I mentioned above you may need to play with the thresholds here, perhaps creating a visitor segment of goal converters (purchases, leads, etc.) and examining the return visit behavior for that segment. Also, when you set “Days Since Last Visit” be sure to use the condition “Less than or equal to” to capture visitors who have been to the site recently:
If your site is like mine you’ll see a noticeable drop in the number of matching visits when you add “Count of Visits” or “Days Since Last Visit” because of the use of the “and” operator. But this is good and to be expected since if everyone coming to your site was truly engaged then you wouldn’t be reading this post, you would just be rolling in money.
All you have to do now is name and save the segment and you’re in business! I called my segment “Engaged Visitors” which is not technically correct — really what I’m tracking is “Engaged Visits” — but when you see the final application of the segment below you’ll understand why.
Step 3: Mine Google Analytics for Engaged Visitors
Once you’ve created your “Engaged Visitors” segment you can start to apply it to the various reports in Google Analytics. I recommend comparing the engagement segment against “All Visits” to get context — and GA does something nice here in calculating the percentage of segment members (= sessions where all four engagement criteria are met) for you. Here you can see how this comparison looks in the Visitors > Map Overlay report:
While I’m only drawing a moderately engaged audience from Australia I am feeling the love from Spain! Probably since my good friend Rene Deschamps is Spanish or perhaps since I’m talking to a web analytics consulting group in Spain about coming over for a presentation and a big Web Analytics Wednesday event this coming Spring … who knows?
Now, I am pretty delighted with how easily these segments can be applied to the various reports in Google Analytics … hell, just the fact that the segment stays applied when I navigate from report to report is nice. And yes, there are some obvious improvements that could be made but for a first effort this is pretty nice.
The same segment can be applied to reports that are more critical to how you run you business, for example the keyword report. When I look at three top keywords driving traffic to my site you can see a clear pattern begin to emerge (and this is without adding the Brand Index into the engagement calculation):
Here you can see an obvious difference in the level of engagement associated with external searches for my brand’s name and “Web Analytics Wednesday.” Even searches for Judah Phillips driving traffic to my site are bringing in a highly engaged audience (Judah, since I know you’re sensitive about this, nearly 30% of the visits associated with searches for you are scoring as engaged … nice work, buddy!)
If you’re willing to keep drilling down you can learn all kinds of wonderful things. Here is a comparison of network traffic coming from WebTrends and Omniture:
Finally, if you’re using your one user defined field to capture some type of visitor identifier (hopefully doing so in line with your privacy policy) you can actually apply the engagement segment to individuals or groups interacting with your web site and actually begin to measure true Visitor Engagement. Here you can see my very good friends Judah and June who are highly engaged at the Analytics Demystified web site, shown in stark contrast to another very active visitor who does not appear to be paying me any Attention at all:
This has become a long post so I’ll stop here for now and leave you with the following summary points:
- Google Analytics, like any session-based system, is not perfectly suited for calculating a true measure of Visitor Engagement;
- That said, given the recent availability of segmentation in Google Analytics, I would encourage those of you running GA to explore the use of my Visitor Engagement calculation;
- My belief is that you will begin to see for yourselves that this measure will help you identify opportunities not easily uncovered using traditional measures like average time on site and bounce rate;
- But you don’t have to take my word for it, do you? Play with the ideas I put forth in this post and let me know what you discover. I would absolutely love to hear what you learn using this segmentation strategy or learn about applications of the segment that I haven’t thought of yet!
Last but not least, keep in mind that I have always put forth my work on Visitor and Audience Engagement as a hypothesis, one that is still being evolved and subject to testing and application in a variety of business situations. The thing I love about our community more than anything is the willingness that most of us show to explore new ideas and have an open mind.
As always I welcome your comments and feedback.
Adriano: Ah, you’re jumping ahead to the next post where I describe the use of the “or” clause to implement the Interaction Index. The Interaction Index can be used (imperfectly in Google Analytics) to capture folks like you who read one page view (which I would not necessarily say is “paying Attention” or at least not in a measurable way) but perform an act that is a clear indicator of Attention — commenting on the blog post.
Keep an eye open for Part II in this short series, and thanks for your comment! I’m glad I was able to “engage” you while you were in GA trying things out 😉
Great post Eric – i am still waiting for the new GA features. Is there anything that i can do to get them?
Hello!
I work for a web site in Brazil and first i would like to say that i liked this post.
I was testing the new features of GA when i received this post at my RSS.
I would like to make you a question.
What about the people how saw just one page on your website?
GA will not have me as a engagement success, since it will not be able to calculate the time i spent on your site with out loading a second page (GA tag) and calculating the time between the two pages.
But i read the entire post i spent more than 3 minutes here, and even left a comment at this post.
Maybe a second kind of engagement measure that looks for time spent OR returning visitor for another post?
Tks!
Adriano
I have heard you speak twice in London at Web Analytics Wednesdays as I assist small and medium sized companies with Google Analytics and Google Adwords here in the UK.
As yet none of my clients can see the updated version of Google Analytics which is obviously extremely frustrating. Your blog on new features has been excellent and we look forward to trying some of the things you highlight as and when Google rolls out the update in the UK.
Moritz: I wish I could help. I had to ask an old friend at Google to participate in the beta myself and I have no visibility into how they’re rolling out the new features. Did you try Twittering @avinashkaushik and asking directly?
Robert: See my answer above to Moritz. I have no visibility into the Google’s global roll-out of the new features (but I understand your frustration!)
Tim: As I mentioned in my post, this is a somewhat imperfect implementation of the Visitor Engagement work I’ve done but I thought given the fact that a lot of sites have Google Analytics it would be worth giving the guidance. And I do think that you can use the Engagement segment and your Buyer segment side-by-side usefully … I look forward to hearing back from you!
FWIW, you can do this same type of segmentation for engagement with Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Unica, etc.
Alec: Glad I could make you smile a little bit. And yeah, I may have not made it clear enough but the measure of Visitor Engagement is designed to be a visitor segmentation strategy. Audience Engagement is slightly different since we don’t have primary access to the data, but even there comScore is working to identify “Poorly” and “Highly” Engaged audience segments.
Deep thought? Perhaps. Too much thought? Definitely 😉
Thanks to you all for your comments!
This is extremely helpful, Eric.
Although I work mainly on e-commerce sites, which are usually assumed to have very easy-to-measure goals, it’s becoming clear to me that the subject of engagement during the course of multiple visits before purchase is a very interesting thing to study.
Thank you for explaining so clearly how the new version of GA can be used to do this.
“But this is good and to be expected since if everyone coming to your site was truly engaged then you wouldn’t be reading this post, you would just be rolling in money.”
I don’t think I’ve ever written ‘ROFL’ before, but it seemed appropriate at this point. Ok, maybe I just tittered. If only you could measure people’s facial expressions as they look at your site 🙂
I like this idea with GA and it wasn’t something I’d thought about until now. All we need to do now is hurry them up rolling out the functionality across all of their accounts. In fact, I’d just assumed you would add up all of your Audience engagement metrics one by one, rather than segmenting the whole audience by each of the thresholds. Clearly some deep thoguht has been going on here.
Just gave it a shot, works well. Thanks for posting, this makes GA a little more useful and saves time from doing offline Excel crunching!
Gemma: Thanks so much for the nice compliment! I hope to make a trip to Madrid and Barcelona this coming Spring so keep your fingers crossed (and I’ll keep watching the level of engagement associated with your fine country!)
Hello from Spain!
I am a big fan of this blog (you always make me think and I love that) so I can easily understand why you feel loved by us 🙂
I already have the engagement segment in my GA account, think it’s very interesting to find the way of measuring “engagement” for each website, it’s very useful.
Thanks a lot, you’ll be welcome any time in Madrid!
Jiri: Google Analytics recency report is is unnecessarily difficult to read. I recommend checking out Lunametrics’s article on the report which is still kinda obtuse but explains that fundamentally the recency report is about ** visits ** not ** visitors ** and that frequently returning visitors are lumped into the “0 days” bucket.
Hope that helps!
Well, gave it a try but I can’t figure out why exactly I should have 80% of all traffic during last 10 months having their last visit 0 days ago (in GA recency report). This is clearly incorrect so do we have GA implemented the wrong way???
Eric: thanks for pointing that article out to me, I’ll have to go through it. But, my immediate thought is we’re an insurance company and I doubt people are coming back so often 🙂
Simple question – is the unit in ‘visit duration’ measured in minutes or seconds?
I assume it is in seconds, right?
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Thank You for this post. I’ve been playing around with it for my bachelors thesis about measuring engagement in web analytics. I think i spotted a small error: “sessions that were both at least three page views and at least three minutes in duration”
I thinkt that the values in GA’s “Visit Duration” are in seconds. So in Your example 180 would be a correct number. This is very sad, of course, as my visitors became instantly much less engaged 🙂
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Thanks for all of your work — you’re a huge help to the web analytics community.
Would you recommend using this measurement as a strategic KPI for a content site? My thinking is that the goal process would be something like new visitor becomes returning visitor, returning visitor becomes engaged visitor, engaged visitor becomes a conversion (subscriber, sponsor, etc.). I know it’s often not as clean as that, but I think that the number or percentage of engaged visitors would be a good indication of how well a content site is doing…
Hi Eric.
I have landed in this page using stumbleupon toolbar on marketing category. Thank you for explaining the advantages of using Google analytics. Although I am not yet too knowldgeable in using GA, I strive and search for guidance over the web. And I found your post very helpful. Thanks again.
Hello Eric,
I know this post is a bit older, but I was hoping you could answer a question. If I’m trying to measure repeat visits for a keyword for example, would that user have to type in that keyword over an over for it to show up as a repeat visit? Is it fair to say the keyword should maybe get credit for the next 30 days of visits? How does one measure this accurately in Google Analytics?; doesn’t it always use the most recent visit? A lot of people will just come directly for follow up visits, so who gets the credit?
Thanks for your time and this great post.
Levi
[…] Track Visitor Engagement using Google Analytics! | Web Analytics Demystified – Keep in mind, what I’m describing in this post is not a full-blown measure of Visitor Engagement for a lot of reasons. Still, as I’m kicking it around it appears to be a pretty good start and per my entire approach towards measures of engagement, I’d rather have all of you banging on the idea than work in a vacuum. […]
Thanks for all of your work — you’re a huge help to the web analytics community.