who will produce and verify the data, and how can publishers and advertisers collaborate to yield actionable intelligence?
How it works in practice: In my previous article we defined engagement as the nature of visitors’ relationship with a site and how that is expressed in the full range of user interaction, involvement and connection. We then adapted Eric Peterson’s model for indexing categories of engagement that effectively describe the kinds of engagement that would illuminate and differentiate Web sites for advertisers: loyalty, recency, click depth, interactivity, duration, and subscription. (Peterson also adds “feedback” and “brand” indices, which are, I believe, not as germane to the outbound advertising sales model). Here is a quick summary of how we can use the engagement index. Each category is indexed according to averages. The index points to the percentage of visitors exceeding the average. If we determine that the average visitor returns to health and medical content sites 4X per year, and 57% of WebMD’s audience returns more than 4X per year, the WebMD Loyalty Index would be 57%. Using hyp
