The Engagement Factor

Written by Lee

As Fresh Egg’s Conversion Rate (and all things Usability and Accessibility related) Consultant I write a fair amount of reports based around a great number of factors, ratios, rates and percentages.

Throughout these reports I tend to reference the relevant ratio or rate instead of the core statistics themselves as they are a great deal easier to understand and compare with one another. For example, if I were to mention that conversions have increased between the month of May to June, it’s a lot easier to say that “the Conversion Rate has increased from 3.4% to 4.6%” that it is say that “traffic has increased by 2,469 visitors but we’ve had an extra 73 conversions” and I think you’ll all agree, it’s a lot easier to measure.

So what’s my point?

Well, these rates and the equations used to generate them already exist, they’re widely-used and well-documented, but what about the other important areas of website usage, which rates exist for those?

Through my research trawling web sites and reading countless books I’m yet to come across a ratio, or rate, even a percentage used to measure how well a web site actually engages its users.

It was upon reading one of my reports that made regular reference to the same 3 sets of statistics in order to measure how successful we had been at ‘engaging users’ from month to month. Instead of re-iterating hard-to-digest statistics over and over he suggested I put together some sort of equation, so that’s exactly what I did:

I’ve implemented this into my recent reports and I have to admit, it has made them a lot easier to understand and work with from both my point of view, and the client’s.

Here is an excellent example of a plot of one of our client’s “Engagement Factors” for this year so far (as you can see I prefer to round to 2DP [2 decimal places]):

Feel free to use, re-distribute and build upon this equation, but please give credit with a link back to this post.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Google, Internet Marketing, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.