Definitions of Customer Engagement: an overview

I begin with definitions of CE created by companies and then proceed with the definitions offered by individual thinkers, mostly leading web analyticians or digital marketers.

Companies:

Gallup

• The Constant Customer
  One of the earliest references to Customer Engagement. Explains Gallup’s definition and measurement of CE.
• What Measuring Customer Engagement Reveals
  Argues that CE is the best measure of your company’s future performance

Webtrends

• Engagement Marketing: The Essential Guide to Building Loyalty Using Web 2.0 Best Practices (PDF, 415KB)
• Commentary by Jeremiah Owyang: Web Strategy Show: WebTrends focuses on Customer Engagement: Interview with Tim Kopp, CMO – 6 August, 2007

Forrester

• Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement (.PDF, 444KB, dont remember how much it costs)
• Commentary by Don Peppers How Do You Measure Engagement?

Future Now

• Measuring Visitor Engagement: Tools + Tips – 14 November 2007
  at Future Now

ComScore

• comScore Announces New “Visits” Metric For Measuring User Engagement
• Commentary by Kevin Newcomb (ClickZ) Can ‘Visits’ Replace Page Views?

Time spent: The following two companies use a single metric, ‘time spent’, to measure ‘engagement’.

Nielsen//NetRatings

• Time shows eBay and RuneScape to be UK’s Most Engaging Sites: Pages, visits or time? Which sites come out on top depending on what you measure! (.PDF, 108KB)- 17 April, 2007
• Commentary by Eric Peterson: On NetRatings and time spent on site

Compete

I felt it was necessary to read all of these in order to get a rough idea about how this metric works, what its components are and how they are defined.

• Compete.com Announces the only Attention-Based Web Metrics
• Measurement, Engagement and Attention (here you can also find commentary by Eric Peterson)

Individuals 

Jim Novo

Definition of CE from within a web analytics perspective

• Recency Defines Engagement – 3 April 2007
• Jonesin’ for Some ROI – 3 April 2007
• Recency Defines Engagement: Campaigns – 7 April 2007
• Recency Defines Engagement: Visitors – 13 April 2007
• Recency Defines Engagement: Customers – 25 April 2007
• On Engagement – October 2007
• A Framework for Engagement – Background – 3 February 2008

You can download Jim’s series of posts on the subject in MS Word (656KB) format here.

Eric Peterson

Definition of CE from within a web analytics perspective

• Part I: How do you calculate engagement – 8 December 2006
• Frank Faubert writes in… – 8 December 2006
• Part II: How do you calculate engagement – 8 December 2006
• Part III: Calculating engagement… Social Engagement – 3 January 2007
• Part IV: The engagement metric defined – 10 January 2007
• A sample of how my visitor engagement index drives insights – 28 January 2007
• The gradual building of context – 9 February 2007
• Part V: Measuring social acitivities online using my visitor engagement metric – 15 February 2007
• Guest blogger: Robbin Steif from Lunametrics! – 5 March 2007
• On NetRatings and time spent on site – 12 July 2007
• How to measure visitor engagement, redux – 22 October 2007
• Example uses of the visitor engagement metric – 29 October 2007
• Starting the discussion: Attention, Engagement, Authority, Influence, … - 28 February 2008

Jeremiah Owyang

Definition of CE from within a web analytics perspective

• Advertising Industry Tackles ‘Engagement’. Social Media Measurement may have a different angle – 11 December 2006
• Webinar Notes: “Web 2.0 How to Measure Social Engagement: Blogs Podcasts and RIAs” - 19 January 2007
• Defining “Engagement” – 1 February 2007

See all of Jeremiah’s posts on the subject of customer engagement and social media measurement in the appendix at the bottom of this page.

Ron Shevlin

Ron provides with a general definition of CE that can be applied to online and offline marketing. He approaches CE from a customer behaviour perspective i.e. what it means for an individual customer to be engaged.

• Engagement Myopia – 2 January 2007
  Ron gives his definition of CE and argues against ARF’s overly general definition.
• Denigrating Customer Engagement – 15 July 2007
  Ron argues against a narrow definition of CE as ‘time spent viewing an ad’.

Steve Jackson

• Measuring Online Engagement Re-visited and introducing the REAN model
  Very interesting post examining the REAN model of engagement. REAN is a novel approach to customer engagement, in that it that it is explicitly designed to help with the planning of measurement frameworks around the lifecycle of customer interaction from acquisition to retention. In the comments, Steve discusses the relationship of REAN to Eric Peterson’s synthetic metric (and therefore to synthetic metrics of engagement in general.)

Theo Papadakis

• Defining Customer Engagement – 4 Jan 2008
• Measuring Online Engagement: What Role Does Web Analytics Play? – 29 Jan 2008
• What is customer engagement for? Your customers need engagement more than you do – 21 Jan 2009