The term engagement within marketing is not new. It has been used for more than 100 years, although the meaning has changed over time. Today it is most frequently used in social media, but it is also a common term in online advertising, where you will find definitions such as this one from IAB:
“A spectrum of consumer advertising activities and experiences — cognitive, emotional, and physical — that will have a positive impact on a brand”
A more straightforward way to describe engagement is: any kind of user interaction with content. Engagement is the proof that people have not only been exposed to your content, but that they have actually consumed it, and that it had some kind of effect. Indicators of engagement include user activities all the way from scrolling down the full article, or turning on the sound on a video, to sharing your content in social media or ordering a product.
So engagement is what every advertiser is striving to get – it shows that their advertising investments have made some kind of difference. This also means that when you pay for your content distribution, this should be reflected in the business model. Banners are typically sold on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, which is fine since the purpose of banner campaigns usually is to increase brand awareness. But as soon as you want to encourage engagement, impressions have very little value. Instead you should be looking to pay per click (CPC), per engagement (CPE) or per action (CPA).
The challenge however, is that in today’s programmatic ecosystems, with multiple parties sitting between the advertisers and the audience, understanding, measuring and controlling the connection between cause (investment) and effect can be difficult.
Surely your content will be exposed to the audience profiles you have defined, and you will be able to get the data, but with Ad Exchanges and Real Time Bidding and it does become more difficult to design campaigns where content and channels are carefully combined to create compelling user experiences.
Strossle has helped thousands of brands to successfully drive engaged users to their content. User data shows that traffic acquired via Strossle’s network of premium publishers spend 120% more time and visit 39% more pages per session, than visitors acquired from social media. That is the kind of engagement you deserve!
Contact your local Strossle representative to learn how you can get more engaged users.
