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?

Here’s a real humdinger with you.

It’s campaign time again. Not just any old campaign; it’s our main recruitment campaign of the year.

What we normally do on this campaign is behaviorally target content to users based on their application stage.

Why? Because we know from previous tests that behaviorally targeting content for re-engagement purposes not only lifts our application completion rate, but provides more relevance to the user when they visit our site – instead of just seeing a standard campaign message each time. And relevance is proven to lift conversions.

But this time, the gates of hell opened and out rode the fifth horseman…with a complicated double somersault backflip twist.

One of the most powerful ways to enable an audience connection is through behavioural segmentation.

Many companies today segment from a business standpoint. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good strategy and aligns your measurement and optimisation strategy with your business segmentation model.

Customer / non-customer segments. Product A owners / product B owners. Mosaic-based segments. Geographic segments. Lead / Non-lead segments. These are all typically business-based segments, and you should definitely be segmenting using this methodology if your overall business does.

But I think there’s a higher level of segmentation – behavioural segmentation. Read on to see how we easily achieved this.

We’ve all got forms on our websites. And chances are, you have multi-page forms. But, do you know how they’re performing? Do you know where people are abandoning your forms? If you knew that, what could you do? There’s lots of ways to track forms but they vary depending upon what you need to accomplish. Multi-page forms, which are very common these days, are slightly more complex from a measurement standpoint, but you definitely want to get some insights into these types of forms. In this post, I look at various ways to review form abandonment, from SiteCatalyst Fallout Reports, to using Discover Fallout Reports, to the Form Analysis plugin.

So, following a recent “back to basics” post, a reader requested that I write something describing how custom traffic props are actually useful. How about customer segmentation achieved through traffic props?

Custom traffic props are used for counting traffic-based activity, to gain insights into user behaviour across our sites. By default, custom traffic props only come enabled with the metric Page Views, which, by itself is, admittedly, not a lot of good. But, with a couple of minor customisations, you can get valuable insights from the props very quickly.

This post is actually about customer segmentation – in our case measuring student activity versus staff activity versus “anonymous” activity. In your case, it’ll probably be customers vs. non-customers. But, you don’t have to stop at the customer vs. non-customer segments either. There’s plenty of other customer segments that you can apply throughout the brand funnel, as they move from being just a browser to a high value loyal customer.

Read on to find out more about enabling customer segmentation.

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.

Many companies struggle with an effective digital measurement strategy, often due to the lack of resources or the lack of understanding how it can provide an effective return on the investment.

And it is an investment. Generally you’ll incur people and training costs and you’ll incur licensing costs for the various platforms. These are all ongoing costs.

But you can demonstrate an ROI that will far outweigh the costs incurred, if you spend the time and effort in putting a solid strategy together. Read on to see the 6 key elements to a successful measurement strategy.

I recently read a great blog post about Cohort Analysis – measuring engagement over time, from 52 weeks of UX, and it got me thinking how to achieve this within Omniture SiteCatalyst.

As it turns out, with a bit of custom code, it’s pretty easy to do, and what an opportunity it opens up.

Cohort Analysis allows you to look at a group of people who start something at a specific time and monitor them over time to see whether their engagement increases or decreases. Then you can also compare them with people who start the same thing at a different point in time.

Read on to find out what this all means, why you need it, and what you can do with it…

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…

So, still want to know certain things like what pages were viewed from visitors conducting a search, or which campaigns are driving most page views – and you don’t have Discover. Well, there’s two parts to this post and a bunch of answers…so read on.