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Online Engagement Research

This article is more than 11 years old
An innovative new piece of online engagement research and media planning tool from the Guardian
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Engagement matters. It is the topic that won't go away and is only increasing in significance for advertisers as consumer attention is spread across an ever expanding array of digital platforms. It is vital for advertisers to understand where they can reach their target audience in the media in which they are most engaged, and crucially how this engagement translates into ad effectiveness, and ultimately higher levels of brand engagement.

Guardian News and Media has produced a piece of research that not only contributes to an understanding of how online advertising works by assessing which behavioural and attitudinal media engagement factors are most strongly associated with ad effectiveness, but furthermore has created an online engagement planning currency and accompanying planning tool to help media planners assess the quality of their intended target audience (as defined by engagement and therefore ad response) across the Guardian network.

Understanding Engagement

Although a complex subject, there is broad consensus that there are three types of engagement that work together to create, maintain or improve the overall level of engagement between a consumer and a particular brand:

Media engagement

This is defined as the extent to which someone is involved with the media they consume. In the online world this covers both surveyed attitudinal measures and claimed media usage, and observed media usage as measured through web analytics.

Advertising engagement

This is the extent to which someone is involved with the content of a specific advert or marketing communication.

Brand engagement

This is a way of classifying a person's disposition towards and relationship with a given brand.

GNM's Online Engagement research concentrates on media engagement on the Guardian website, and its relationship with advertising engagement.

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The sheer measurability of online dictates that any methodology used to measure engagement should take in both surveyed responses and observed / tracked online data. Omniture survey – from the providers of the Guardian's web analytics system - was chosen as the tool to enable us to do just that.

In early 2012, a survey ran across the entire guardian website. Questionnaire content related to attitudinal media engagement factors, while respondents' web analytics data was recorded to measure how they were using and interacting with the website.

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The questionnaire also covered a number of questions relating to ad effectiveness. Five campaigns that were running throughout early 2012 on different areas of the site were selected to give a representative view across industry sectors. The ad effectiveness questions related to brand metrics throughout the branding funnel – from ad recall through to purchase likelihood:

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Creating a model of engagement

Analysis of the results was conducted with Kantar Media and revealed that twelve key media engagement factors were primarily linked to ad effectiveness. These ranged from attitudes towards the Guardian website and the Guardian, measures of interaction with the site and its content, along with simple behavioural measures relating to frequency of site usage.

These twelve factors fed in to a single engagement index (referred to as the Endex), weighted by their importance:

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The Endex was then calculated for every respondent within the survey. Ultimately, as the Endex score increases, so too does an individual's engagement with advertising on the Guardian website:

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Planning on engagement

This process enabled the creation of an online engagement planning tool, accessible via industry media planning software and enabling advertiser target audiences to be profiled by where they can be found at their most engaged and where they are therefore most responsive to advertising across the Guardian site.

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In the below example of a female target audience, planning on engagement across Guardian sites reveals a very different site selection to planning solely on reach, with sites such as Life and Style, Environment, Money and Travel revealing that they tend to attract the type of women who are more engaged with the Guardian site overall while achieving a higher effective reach among that target audience.

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Contact

To learn more about the Guardian's Online Engagement research and discover how you can use the planning tool to maximise return on yours and your clients' advertising, please contact:

Ian Gibbs
Head of Commercial Insight
Audience Department
ian.gibbs@theguardian.com
T: +44 (0)20 3353 2329

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