So I promised that I would finally put fingertip to keyboard and talk a little bit more about using Visitor Scoring…to finish up the series that I started a while ago.

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that we implemented a series of metrics for engagement measurement, culminating in a per-visitor score.

I wanted to share with you some of the insights and benefits of doing all of this, particularly in Discover.

This is the third (but not final) post in the series on Visitor Engagement. One of the problems with the Visitor Scoring method that I previously described, is that, at the end of the day, you’re still somewhat limited to viewing scores at the “average” level, by segment.

That presents a number of challenges because the average is precisely that…and the underlying scores vary dramatically within each segment.

But there is a way to see what each and every visitor score is, or even within the different segments…and it’s called the Unique Visitor ID. You can see at the visitor level, how many times they’ve returned, how many “things” they’ve done, such as searches, product views, revenue etc.

This is really the icing on the proverbial cake.

Now, there’s a hot topic. Measuring engagement. One of the most widely debated topics in web analytics.

What is engagement and how do we measure it?

Engagement, unfortunately, is not derived from a single measure. It’s not time on site. It’s not how many pages they viewed. It’s not bounce rates and it’s not about conversions.

Engagement is about a lot of things. What is an engaged visitor and how do you measure engagement?

It often strikes me as strange that people still look at numbers in the aggregate. Knowing that you get a certain amount of page views, or a certain amount of visitors and so forth, doesn’t really tell you anything.

In order to get some insights of value, things that you can really act on, you need to segment your traffic and conversions.

But so few people really do it, and even fewer do it really well. Read on to find out why segmentation should form the basis of your analytics strategy…