Why is engagement important?

I served as a panelist at the SUPERCOMM Digital Broadband Forum in Chicago today, at a session entitled “The Engaged Consumer.” The discussion was quite interesting, led by our moderator Steve Dennen of Comscore with my fellow panelists, John McCready of Nortel, Joe Paulsen of Experian, and Sumit Rai of Kulu Valley. Engagement is such a nebulous term, used to mean so many different things by different people, that you might wonder why engagement is even important.

Image by Davichi via Flickr

And for some companies, engagement really isn’t important. Google, for example, has made a living in search by being as disengaged as possible–they get you your search results and send you on your way. So, why are we fixated with engagement?
I think we all yearn for things to be simple. We want something easy to understand and measure, and some get excited about the idea that engagement is the right answer. But engagement is never important in and of itself. Who cares if someone spends an hour on your site an never buys anything while someone else parachutes in and makes a purchase in 30 seconds?
No, we often use engagement as a surrogate for loyalty or intent to purchase or some other valuable business goal, when it is in fact just a means to an end. On the panel, Sumit pointed out that if you use a tabbed browser, some measurements of time on site seem to show engagement when they actually show that you aren’t paying any attention at all. Now, most metrics systems are more sophisticated than that, but the point remains that measuring engagement as an end in itself might not help you make better decisions.
No, direct marketing principles put engagement in its place, as a sign that response is in the offing. Response is the real thing to measure, because with enough responses you will eventually make a sale.
If you’re focused on engagement or any other metric that has no tie to sales, you might want to examine your motivation. You’re probably better off looking for something that your CFO understands better than engagement.