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Tim Kopp, Chief Marketing Officer, is responsible for all WebTrends marketing efforts including overall strategy, brand identity and awareness, and demand generation. Prior to joining WebTrends, Tim served as Vice President of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for The Coca-Cola Company, responsible for gaming, mobile, web, CRM initiatives, as well as managing key partnerships. He also worked at Procter & Gamble for nearly eight years, leading P&G's Interactive Marketing Program for the entire Global Beauty Care division. Tim is a frequent speaker at key industry conferences and events and has served on the advisory board for AdTech and other industry committees.

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Grappling With Engagment: It’s About Time…& More

Written on
August 7th 2007
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by Tim Kopp  |
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movingforward23.jpgRecently, the industry has debated the most effective ways to measure online consumer engagement, with some vendors moving from pages viewed to time spent. Unfortunately, engagement is not something you can measure using a stopwatch alone. If you could, we’d be back in 1999 talking about site stickiness and hits.
 
It’s no wonder that the concept of engagement has become such a lightning rod for publishers, marketers and agencies. At the end of the day, marketing is really just a conversation. The best marketers know that it’s a two-way conversation—a dialogue that builds relationships with target consumers.
 
When we have a “live” conversation with a friend, co-worker or spouse, it is easy to see how engaged the other person is. There are many indicators; are they making direct eye contact, leaning forward or sitting with their arms crossed, nodding in agreement, or, most importantly, are they responding to you?
 
In the online space, marketers obviously lack the ability to perceive some of these nuances, however, they have a tremendous advantage over those purely using traditional mediums like Television, Print, Out of Home and even offline Direct Marketing. Online marketers have the unique ability to see every customer action, from the initial response, to the depth, frequency and focus of their interactions over time.
 
This is why, as an industry, we are so excited about online engagement–especially now that marketers have the ability to measure an weigh each activity as offered through WebTrends Score, a patented solution that reveals the true value, interests and engagement of visitors. There’s no better source of information, from what assets a customer already owns to their demographic profile that a marketer can use to deduce what a customer is most likely to do next. This real-time insight into prospect and customer intent is plentiful on the Web. Yet much of the interactive advertising industry is focused on general yardsticks of “page views” or “time spent”, both of which do not do justice to the opportunity marketers have to leverage the engagement of visitors to truly understand, interact and respond to them in unique ways. I think a better definition of engagement might be time spent+interaction+emotional response. However the industry today is only measuring one of these three attributes instead of all 3 at once.
 
For every business, and even every campaign, engagement means different things that must be interpreted by marketers within the context of their business objectives. However, the goal remains the same: to create messages and offers so powerful and relevant that customers deepen their relationship with you because they want to, not because they have to. This need for relevancy in marketing is only accelerating as it is being driven by consumer choices and control, as well as the rise of social media.
 
Measuring marketing and web site ROI is more than just tallying page views or even revenue earned; it’s about understanding whether consumers are becoming more or less engaged with your business over time in ways that matter given your objectives and having the insight to do something about it. The future of web measurement is about understanding and fostering engagement in the context of your business and marketing objectives.

If you want to continue the conversation, I’m listening; drop me a line at: tim.kopp@webtrends.com



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