15 Customer Engagement Metrics You Should be Tracking

May. 06, 2010

engaged customer According to Forrester Research there are four main components to your customers’ engagement with your brand:

Involvement – The measurable aspects of an individuals’ relationship with your company or brand
Interaction – The depth of those individuals’ relationship (ie. If involvement is touches, then interaction is actions)
Intimacy – The sentiments or feelings of individuals towards your company or brand
Influence – The likelihood that an individual will encourage a fellow customer to consider or buy your brand

Within these four main components there are several key metrics that you can track. Understanding these numbers can help you gauge your customers’ engagement on several different levels and help you improve your relationship with them.

Involvement (these metrics can be tracked through tools like Google Analytics):

Site visits – How many people are visiting your site?
Time spent – How long did they spend on your site before they clicked away?
Pages Viewed – How many pages did a visitor view before they left your site?
Keywords searched – What words did a visitor search to find your site?
Navigation paths – Where did a visitor navigate to after landing on your site?

Interaction (these can be tracked through social media):

Number of comments contributed to your blog
Number of unique commenters on your blog
Quantity/frequency of written reviews, blog comments, forum discussions

Intimacy (these can be tracked through customer service calls, surveys and social media):

Sentiment tracking through social media
Sentiment tracking of internal customer contributions
Opinions expressed in customer service calls

Influence (these can be tracked through customer service calls, surveys and social media):

Product/service satisfaction ratings
Brand affinity
Content forwarded to friends (email, retweets, facebook postings etc.
Posts on high profile blogs

Are you tracking all these metrics? If you’re not, you should really get started today. Not only can all of the above metrics be measured with free or cost-effective tools, but also because if you’re not already looking at these numbers then there are most likely some serious gaps in your understanding of your customers’ engagement with your brand.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at May 6, 2010 5:00 PM