Understanding Digital Customer Engagement on a Physical Level
How we can measure physical interaction to better understand customer attention.
How we can measure physical interaction to better understand customer attention.
When trying to understand customers’ interactions with the digital channel, many marketers and sales teams throw around the term “engagement.” They are typically measuring tactical data such as time on site, products viewed per session, and, at the very basic level, clicks per session. This poses an interesting challenge: visitors focused on finding a specific piece of information often rapidly click through multiple pages of a website without ever reading anything. They may have viewed many products, or spent a good amount of time on the site, clicking on many links during the process. These users appear engaged without actually being engaged. To overcome this obstacle, some sites have started to put more attention on data points such as time on page and scroll tracking to better understand engagement. But even these data points don’t paint a clear enough picture of whether or not your content or functionality is interesting enough to keep a customer’s attention.
Tracking Physical Interaction With a Site Provides Better Insight Into Customer Engagement
For laptop and desktop users, tracking mouse movement and scrolling with heat maps adds a critical perspective to understanding physical interaction with a page. Now, there is much healthy debate over how closely mouse movement correlates with other levels of engagement such as eye movement. But, it is safe to say that someone who is actively moving her mouse around your page, hovering over critical elements of the page, and scrolling down the page is actually looking at the page and interpreting the elements of the page. She is actually engaged.
Tracking physical engagement gets more exciting with smartphones and tablets, as the touchscreens offer a variety of ways to track visitors’ fingers on a web page. Tracking movements such as changes in device orientation, multi-finger pinches (zooming), and swiping fingers across the screen gives site owners an accurate understanding of how engaged visitors view, as well as interact with page information. Mobile sites that track location multiple times per session can report on how much the visitor is in physical motion (e.g., walking, riding, etc.) while surfing a site. While web browsers don’t currently offer any ability to gather tracking data from the accelerometer or gyroscope, native mobile applications do allow the tracking of tilt, angle, direction, rotation, or vibration of the device. This physical interaction can then be sent back to an analytics tracking application such as Google Analytics and can show even greater context of how engaged a visitor is.
The remainder of 2013 promises to be an amazing year for analysts wanting to track a customer’s physical interaction with the digital channel. Below are several revolutionary platforms that will redefine how customer engagement is tracked.
With every significant advancement in tracking customers, there are privacy issues to review. Privacy advocates have already started to raise concerns about Google Glass’ ability to record videos of strangers without their knowledge even before the devices have become available to the public market. For people who were legitimately concerned about an advertiser’s ability to recommend products based on user behaviors, they will be equally horrified when they see an advertisement suggesting they try Zoloft because they have been looking melancholy for the last couple of weeks.
Why Are These Technologies Significant to Organizations Wanting to Know More About Their Customers?
In 2013, we measure customer engagement by the amount of time they spend with content and whether or not they click on it. Essentially, we are tracking fingers clicking on buttons and the time in between clicks. In 2014, we can start to track a much higher level of engagement including knowing if visitors are reading, scanning, or ignoring content as well as if the content is making viewers fall asleep, cry, laugh, or even pout. We may have access data points we never imagined, such as whether an individual is viewing the content alone or a group of people together is viewing the content. These new technologies bring the promise of the biggest improvement in tracking customer data since browsers first started supporting tracking beacons. While today the best technology for tracking complex digital behaviors is a digital cookie, next year we might be able to know if the customer is reading content while actually eating a cookie.
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