Sitecore Engagement Value Scale

What Is Engagement Value?

Engagement value is a measurement of how engaged website visitors are by tracking the actions they perform on your site, against weighted goals that you set.

The weighting of the goals reflects the importance of that goal completion to your business. For example, a visitor’s action of completing your contact form might be very important for your business, so you’d give that goal a much higher score than reading a blog.

The visitor then accumulates a score as they progress through browsing your website and completing different activities. You can then use this score to measure their engagement, their value as well as the success of your content.

Why Measure Engagement?

Measuring engagement can help you to not only gain more insight into how your website content and UX is performing, but also how engaged and valuable your website visitors are. You can see how engaged your visitors are with your content, but also how valuable a visitor is to your business.

You can then focus your sales efforts on those visitors that are more likely to convert, and continue to nurture those that need a little more love and education, all while you continually optimize your content and UX to create the best experience possible for all visitors.

How Engagement Value Scores Work

Like I mentioned, you’ll need to assign numerical values to goals and events that users can complete on your site, that reflect how significant that goal or event completion is for your business. You’ll set these up in Sitecore to trigger after different actions are completed.

As visitors browse your content and complete goals and events on your site, they accumulate an engagement value score.

You can then use this score to compare different visitors, and better understand your website’s performance with whole site analytics like engagement per visit.

Understanding Your Business Goals

It’s important that you set your engagement value scale and goals up correctly so you’re able to get the most out of it.

To set this up the most accurate way, you’ll want to start big and then narrow down to your digital goals.

You’ll need to be clear on, and write down, the strategic theme of your business or organization, the strategic objective, and then your business’ marketing objectives.

The strategic theme You can think of the strategic theme as the business’ overarching big vision.

The strategic objective explains what the business needs to do to achieve its vision, and the marketing objectives are the marketing goals that the business needs to meet in order to achieve the strategic objective. The digital goals are the actions that users on the website need to fulfil in order to achieve the marketing goals, and are usually actions that lead to a conversion.

Sitecore uses this example to demonstrate what these goals could look like for a vehicle manufacturer:

• Strategic theme: Become the leading carmaker worldwide
• Strategic objective: Increase market share
• Marketing objectives: Accelerate qualified leads; increase awareness
• Digital goals: Book a test drive; check local stock; register my interest; download specs

Planning Your Engagement Value Scale Goals

Before you go wild creating a bunch of goals and events in your Sitecore environment, you’ll need to do some planning. The best way to plan what goals and events will receive what engagement value score, is to create an engagement value scale. An engagement value scale is the hierarchy of your goals and events that can help you determine how many points each event should receive.

This step is crucial to get the most out of Sitecore’s goals and events and to make sure your goals and event scoring accurately reflect the value of those goals and events to your business.

First, in a spreadsheet, make lists of all the goals you want visitors to complete on your site, and the events that your visitors want to complete on your site.

Add the following columns to the spreadsheet and fill them in:

• Name
• Type of action (goal, event, failure action)
• Value
• Description

To determine how much value to assign to goals or events, use a scale from 0-100 and rank your goals based on the impact they have on achieving your marketing goals.

This will depend entirely on what actions are possible on your website, and what’s important to your business. For example, if someone completes a contact form, and this is the most important action someone could complete on your site, you might want to give them 100 points, while someone who’s downloaded a brochure might be much lower in the funnel, so you’ll only give them 25 points.

It’s completely up to your business how you want to structure the goals, as long as they’re relative to each other, and accurately reflect someone’s engagement and value to your business.

Here's just one example of an engagement value scale:

Next Up

In my next blog, I'll show you how to set up the goals and events in Sitecore that will track your engagement values. I'll post a link here when that blog is live. Until then, take care and good luck with your engagement value scale!