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?

One of the fundamental things you need to understand about Omniture SiteCatalyst is the difference between an s.prop and an eVar, and just what events are and when to set them. They are at the heart of the product and provide the ability to customise it to suit your business needs.

If you don’t understand the difference, you’re going to be in a world of pain, and left dazed and confused.

This is, understandably, the most confusing thing to new SiteCatalyst users, and they take a bit of getting used to, especially when you start to combine them all together, but once you understand them, you’ll be on your way to generating custom ones that can really provide insight. Hopefully this post will help out in some small way.

Here’s another really simple customisation that you can and should do as part of your basic implementation, which helps you to further understand attribution.

Attribution is probably one of the hardest and most contested measurements available…which “thing” led your customer to do something. Read on to find out more about stacking in SiteCatalyst.

In my previous post on People who liked this, also liked…, I put forward an idea how to generate “related” products of interest, based on what users were looking at, which could then be automated and re-published back to a site, based on Omniture data.

Having implemented this, we’ve made an interesting observation, which changes one our user assumptions, and I thought it was worthy of a quick posting.

I was chatting with one of our School Deans today about various results and he posed the question “Is it possible to see which courses people viewed after seeing one course?”. His interest was based on the fact that the user doesn’t always purchase the “most frequently visited course”. They often view one thing, but end up purchasing something else, and our reporting doesn’t highlight that behaviour.

Now, that got me thinking…that’s probably pretty common behaviour. So how can we make that visible?