(I’m adding this comment here and also left it on Mr. Cain’s blog)

Hello Mr. Cain,

Sorry not to get to this sooner. “Dayparting”. Fascinating term that I believe I’ve encountered before. If not the term, definitely the concept. Thanks for pointing to my posts on TheFutureOf blog.

Should “Dayparting” be part of this growing lexicon? I’d love it to be and for selfish reasons. Although I don’t think NextStage uses the term, we have been telling and sharing with clients the differences in how people respond to information based on time of day.

For example, as I write this at 10:50amET on Wednesday, 13 Aug 08, I can go to NextStage’s InFocus Morning, Afternoon and Evening reports for the past few days and see that how people think when they’re navigating websites changes dramatically during these time periods. Knowing this information for specific marketing efforts translates into a variety of suggestions regarding Multi-Channel Analytics. It’s possible to explain what channels to use during which part of the day and how to use them.

At least that’s how we think of “Dayparting” now that we know the term.

And thanks.

Responding to Daniel Shield’s 11 April 08, 12:38pm comment

“…impulse; which is the act of bouncing or not bouncing at the processing of a page (typically this is less than 6 seconds).” If I understand correctly, you’re defining “impulse” as whether or not someone bounces from a page during page processing.

“We usually refer to this as simple engagement.” If I understand correctly in the above, you also define the above as “simple engagement”. Note that I’m not arguing or complaining, merely seeking to understand and asking for clarification.

“…there is an assessment of the mindset based on dispositions and understanding how people are using the information which is presented to them.” Could you explain this further? I’m intrigued. It seems as if this is some kind of calculation step (”assessment”). What is the “understanding” based on?

“Based on the values which can be segmented out from each data point and our naming conventions, we determine actionability.” “Actionability” is a calculated value, then? Is this actionability something you calculate to determine what you should do with the user? Or is it some metric you’re applying to users (Person A is more actionable than Person B, etc)?

“This is where a user has collected enough information to act on the secondary, post-impulse, idea of the page and the options which are presented.” How do you know that a user has collected enough information so on and so forth? I think my understanding of some of the terms being used in different than how they’re being used.

Breaking apart your statements (and assuming I understand them. Always a big “if”), I get

A user has stayed on a page past the point at which processing is complete (ie, a finished page is delivered and is no longer loading).
Because they’ve stayed on the page to the point that it’s fully loaded they are demonstrating “simple engagement”.
A calculation is performed (assessment).
Either a metric is applied, routing is determined or options are provided (actionability).
The user performs some action.

It’s that last step where my understanding falls down. So far I can recognize that they perform some action because they stayed on a page until it was fully loaded. Does this mean they’ve “collected enough information to act”? I’ll accept that as valid in theory, not necessarily in application.

Whatever happens in that last step, it is now defined as “conviction”. “This is follow through. To what extent or in what level of frequency does this ‘type’ of user go through, or complete the action which they have committed to. Subsequent and subordinate measures help us understand where human decision processes are involved, and, simultaneously provide a steady measure of how our technical performance is being executed.” Again I think my definitions vary from yours. Note that I think such differences are a good thing as without them we couldn’t grow in understanding or as people. My point of view is that knowing what that an option is chosen or a link is clicked only tells me that an option was chosen or a link was clicked. Unless I know what people are thinking before, after and during I have no basis for understanding the cognitive processes that led to these particular acts, no understanding of the motivations that caused these acts, no understanding of the psycho-behavioral basis for these acts.

Then again, I’m a bit of a nudge on such things.

“I know this is in some ways mathematically complicated to express.” I love the Einstein quote, “Do not worry about your difficulties with mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.” My understanding is that he wrote it to a grade school girl who asked him for help with her homework (probably an urban myth of some kind, that).

“I would love to work with anyone on developing this further and pushing wider understanding of these types of things. Happy to work with you on it. Let’s talk.

Responding to Steve Jackson’s 25 March 08, 8:02pm comment

“Why do we need to go there when we all know that it works?” Well, my first thought is that if someone (hopefully someseveral) don’t “go there” then we won’t be able to fix it when it breaks or make it better. This applies to everything, me thinks, not just formulae.

“But isn’t it a bit like trying to define the concepts of force over distance and basic angular momentum principles when all you’re really talking about is a hammer?” This is my point. Without understanding why hammers work we won’t be able to make them better and (more importantly) recognize when they’re not required and (most importantly) won’t work at all. Or to quote Maslow, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Thanks for “I truly believe that you will crack it and you will be able to define Engagement to all.” I believe that’s been cracked. Several times at this point. It’s putting all the pieces back together again that is my greater goal.

For retail sites we’ve worked to try to define three subsets of engagement which helps us understand points at which behavior resonates with the action performed on the site. As a result, our engagement takes into account the impulse; which is the act of bouncing or not bouncing at the processing of a page (typically this is less than 6 seconds). We usually refer to this as simple engagement. Other folks probably have their own names for this. After this, there is an assesment of the mindset based on dispositions and understanding how people are using the information which is presented to them. Based on the values which can be segmented out from each data point and our naming conventions, we determine actionability. This is where a user has collected enough information to act on the secondary, post-impulse, idea of the page and the options which are presented. The last, is the measure of conviction. This is follow through. To what extent or in what level of frequency does this ‘type’ of user go through, or complete the action which they have committed to. Subsequent and subordinate measures help us understand where human decision processes are involved, and, simultaneously provide a steady measure of how our technical performance is being executed.

I know this is in some ways mathematically complicated to express. It is a work in progress and we’re trying all the time to elevate this further, but we’ve found that uncovering users intent, and plotting areas where they accelerate or hyper-accelerate their process gives us an advantage to provide similar information quality in areas where potential for these exhibited traits exist. I would love to work with anyone on developing this further and pushing wider understanding of these types of things.

Sincerely,

Daniel

A hammer is easily understood. A hammer can be described in terms like “well you just hit the nail with this end and it sticks in the wall”.

That’s what is needed, no complex stuff is required.

Why do we need to go there when we all know that it works?

I took two looks at Erics formula originally. The first time I saw it worked. The second time I saw it worked in the context of the REAN model. I thought yep, cool REAN works as well - though I already knew this, I remember getting all excited about it and showing Eric at the time.

A 55 yr old exec (an average one anyway) wouldn’t get Eric’s formula but would get something like “Try this and you might generate more leads”.

I truly believe that you will crack it and you will be able to define Engagement to all.

But isn’t it a bit like trying to define the concepts of force over distance and basic angular momentum principles when all you’re really talking about is a hammer?

The moon was something no-one had conquered, so was Everest. Have we really not conquered engagement already?

You said;

A definition of anything that only works for certain things at certain times under certain conditions is not a useful definition to me as I can’t guarantee that things, times and conditions will always apply.

I agree.

That’s why we use dimensions (as defined by the WAA also) to group our metrics into a standard lifecycle model. The hammer without the theory? I dunno, I’m just kind of wondering out loud.

Firstly. What are you trying to achieve? I’m working to create a framework that allows different disciplines to merge in ways that provide value. I’m pretty sure I’ve stated this several times and in several ways in several places.

what will it allow me to do as a consultant with my customers? or as a practioner? Before you answer that bear my second point in mind. I have no knowledge of you or your customers, hence am at a handicap and will do my best to explain what the formula allows me to do as a consultant with my customers and in my practice.

This reformulation allows me to let my customers know which definition of “engagement” or which mixture of definitions is best going to suit their business objectives.
I can determine which of all metrics is most directly affecting visitor “engagement”.
I can determine what — out of all possible modifications — needs to be modified and how to modify it in order to achieve business goals.
It shows me very quickly how different “engagement” paradigms come together and allows me to begin studying their overlap.
From here I can begin predicting which visitors will be engaged and at what levels, possibly providing a new segmentation for the sales funnel. (might have commented on this in more detail at Comment 199)

I find the above useful in my practice and none of them is as important (to me) as recognizing that the form shown above is the theory. Now that I understand the theory I can very easily determine which applications of the theory will work with browsers, with smartphones, with mall kiosks, … However, without first knowing the theory I could never fathom that a chosen method for determining “engagement” on a website would fail when attempting to measure the “engagement” of someone walking down the street looking for the nearest Starbuck’s on their smartphone.

Eric wrote at one point “The purported complexity of my calculation…” and went on to mention that some folks were having various challenges with it. One of the things that falls out of the above is three or four simplified versions of Eric’s calculation, each version adding a level of accuracy based on a) his definition of “engagement” and b) how much effort someone is willing to put in to determining how “engaged” visitors are.

This is quite valuable to me.

Secondly, showing the current example to my customers would result in me being showed the door and never being invited back. The average practitioner might be put off by it’s complexity. I would suggest this would be something that both NextStage and Eric would never try to explain to a client. At least when I’ve worked with Eric his thoughts are easily translated into non mathematical terms. I’m guessing that your clients, Eric’s clients and NextStage’s clients hire us for the same reason; to make the intractable tractable. Lots of NextStage’s clients come to us basically saying that web analytics doesn’t tell them what to do, only what has been done. One of the things NextStage does is come up with mathematical models that then become simple tools that provide simple yet concise instructions on what to do. This isn’t my attempt to sell anything here, it’s my attempt to share that without a thorough theoretical understanding then applications become vertical boundaries. Theoretical frameworks provide horizontal frameworks from which a wide variety of vertical applications can grow. And better, by knowing what doesn’t work in application A I can quickly determine whether or not something similar might work or not in application B.

Example: A hammer is a hammer is a hammer, and until you understand the concepts of force over distance and basic angular momentum principles (you don’t need to know those terms, only the principles behind them) then you’ll never understand that knowing why you should drive a nail by holding the hammer at the base rather than the neck explains how to hit a ball out of the park every time you swing (and connect, of course).

(And it’s probably worth noting that I am what is considered a “second-order” tool maker. I create tools that create tools.)

I guess my question is how do we ever communicate this easily when this is the way forward?
SELECT “hi(vi)” AS “ENGAGEMENT”
FROM “N - n”
WHERE “D[hk(vk)]” = somevalue
AND “D[hj(vj)]” = someothervalue
AND …
GROUP BY “xi - ti”
ORDER BY “V” (or “I” or even “A”)
The error is mine as I thought framing the formula as a SQL statement would have explained it a bit.

If this is an academic debate … I disagree that it’s an academic debate. That’s just me.

…that will explain to the minority who read this blog and understand your lines of thought (me included by the way) that there is a standard way to describe and understand engagement…yes. That’s the key. There is a standard way to describe “engagement” based on how the term is defined. It’s not a matter of correct or incorrect descriptions because (like relativity) the best definition depends on a) what you want to measure and b) how you want to measure it.

…then I’m for it because it allows me to see how the great minds in this field are thinking.

However I would never use it unless I could explain it to a 55 year old executive that has an extremely busy schedule, has never done web/customer analytics and doesn’t particularly care about the math, but does care about how to spend the budget she has for this quarter. As you wish (and using some minor modifications to Eric’s definitions to simplify the calculation); “If you, Ms. Executive, can provide me with click depth, loyalty, feedback and interaction values then I can provide you with a reasonably good idea of how ‘engaged’ the majority of your visitors are. If you can add in duration and recency then I can both blow your socks off and tell you what to do to get more of them engaged. If you can segment your audience into branded and non-branded events then I can tell you how to get more conversions. If you can provide the average number of visits it takes for a visitor to convert, we can fine tune further, possibly shortening the interval.”

However, without going through the math I did I would never be able to suggest a statement such as the one above because I wouldn’t have noticed which metrics (click depth, loyalty, feedback and interaction) have common factors, how to redefine those metrics so that they generate (depending on your requirements) either smooth curves or step-wise functions, that duration and recency require different scaling functions to behave correctly in the calculation or that branded and non-branded events are providing completely different information sets about site visitors.

I don’t see the point of creating anything which can’t be easily described and understood by everyone who sees it. That’s why I find this a tad irritating. If you can boil it down for my customers I could get really enthusiastic about it. Fair enough. My role in most of my jobs has always been to provide technical or research foundations for others to use in their practice so what I’m offering here might not be of immediate value to you.

Yes we may have some long and convulted equation that works for describing engagement but unless you can boil it down to something really simple like e = MC squared or better yet engagement equals click depth and duration then the people that matter (the clients paying our salaries) aren’t going to be impressed by any of this work. I’ve been likening the above to general relativity and Eric’s calculation (corrected) to special relativity in discussions for a while now.

We all have different definitions of engagement now and as I understand it translate that to the customer quite well.

Apart from attempting to define something not currently defined in mathematical terms what does this discussion achieve? I think I explain this above. Let me know if I don’t.

I mentioned before that Eric had published what I thought was a very comprehensive formula to describe engagement. I said that because his formula touched on every aspect of the customer lifecycle, it measured an aspect of the whole thing. But Eric freely admits that it wasn’t the answer to everyones’ engagement problem, merely an iteration of his own thoughts on the matter which span back years and allow him to determine his best source of leads from his own marketing initiatives. And with all due respect to Eric and you, the caveating that occurs in this paragraph is exactly why I went through the exercise. A definition of anything that only works for certain things at certain times under certain conditions is not a useful definition to me as I can’t guarantee that things, times and conditions will always apply. However, understanding why certain things, times and conditions make things work in certain ways I can translate the things, times and conditions so they’ll work in other ways as needed.

I’ve written before about the anthropologist and the microbiologist having lunch, the microbiologist looks at her watch and exclaims, “My goodness! I have to go destroy a culture!” and the anthropologist has a heart attack. Unless you recognize at what “culture” means then it’s hard to appreciate that two disparate fields could use the term with equal eloquency to describe different things.

Your version seems to be an even more in depth one than Erics. However it’s not in my opinion going to be the answer because it’s not going to be used easily.

I don’t have a definitive way to describe engagement, nor do I have a one rules all formula but I do have a way to describe the lifecycle and measure it in a client friendly understandable way. We call it REAN. Reach, Engage, Activate and Nurture where Engage is simply click depth and duration - in other words interaction metrics. For what it’s worth, the above formulation accomodates your definition of “engagement”. As I wrote in Comment 199, “So, are simple metrics enough to define engagement? Depends how accurately you want to define it. If you want to use “session duration” to measure engagement then just call it “session duration” and keep things in their simplest form (the KISS philosophy). You have high session duration and want to call it engagement? Then great! The majority of your visitors are engaged. Are the majority of your visitors doing something useful? To themselves or to you? No? Then they are not engaged in an economically useful way (and I’m using “economics” in the NextStage sense of exchange, not a simple money concept). Eric’s definition concludes with the concept of business goals. If simple metrics fulfill your business goals then you’re good. If they don’t, join the discussion.

Firstly. What are you trying to achieve? what will it allow me to do as a consultant with my customers? or as a practioner? Before you answer that bear my second point in mind.

Secondly, showing the current example to my customers would result in me being showed the door and never being invited back. The average practitioner might be put off by it’s complexity. I would suggest this would be something that both NextStage and Eric would never try to explain to a client. At least when I’ve worked with Eric his thoughts are easily translated into non mathmatical terms.

I guess my question is how do we ever communicate this easily when this is the way forward?

SELECT “hi(vi)” AS “ENGAGEMENT”
FROM “N - n”
WHERE “D[hk(vk)]” = somevalue
AND “D[hj(vj)]” = someothervalue
AND …
GROUP BY “xi - ti”
ORDER BY “V” (or “I” or even “A”)

If this is an academic debate that will explain to the minority who read this blog and understand your lines of thought (me included by the way) that there is a standard way to describe and understand engagement then I’m for it because it allows me to see how the great minds in this field are thinking.

However I would never use it unless I could explain it to a 55 year old executive that has an extremely busy schedule, has never done web/customer analytics and doesn’t particularly care about the math, but does care about how to spend the budget she has for this quarter.

I don’t see the point of creating anything which can’t be easily described and understood by everyone who sees it. That’s why I find this a tad irritating. If you can boil it down for my customers I could get really enthusiastic about it.

Yes we may have some long and convulted equation that works for describing engagement but unless you can boil it down to something really simple like e = MC squared or better yet engagement equals click depth and duration then the people that matter (the clients paying our salaries) aren’t going to be impressed by any of this work.

We all have different definitions of engagement now and as I understand it translate that to the customer quite well.

Apart from attempting to define something not currently defined in mathmatical terms what does this discussion achieve?

I mentioned before that Eric had published what I thought was a very comprehensive formula to describe engagement. I said that because his formula touched on every aspect of the customer lifecycle, it measured an aspect of the whole thing. But Eric freely admits that it wasn’t the answer to everyones’ engagement problem, merely an iteration of his own thoughts on the matter which span back years and allow him to determine his best source of leads from his own marketing initiatives.

Your version seems to be an even more in depth one than Erics. However it’s not in my opinion going to be the answer because it’s not going to be used easily.

I don’t have a definitive way to describe engagement, nor do I have a one rules all formula but I do have a way to describe the lifecycle and measure it in a client friendly understandable way. We call it REAN. Reach, Engage, Activate and Nurture where Engage is simply click depth and duration - in other words interaction metrics.