When it comes to measuring how engaged your audience is, your email open and clickthrough rates are the best way to gauge their level of interest, right? Not necessarily. If you're only looking at email metrics, you're not getting a true picture of how your marketing efforts are performing. Measuring audience engagement can have an impact on your future campaigns...

...and your bottom line. Follow this five step guide to improving the way you measure just how interested your audience really is.

Step 1: Perform a Metrics Inventory

Take a look at your email marketing, web analytics, CRM system and other software tools to determine what metrics are available to you. If you're using a software package like Lyris HQ, you'll have metrics similar to the following that you can use to make judgments about your audience's level of engagement:

Email Marketing Data

Open rates: In order for a message recipient to begin the engagement process, they have to open that email first. High open rates are a good sign that your brand is well-recognized and/or your email subject line is appealing.

Unique Opens: Unique Opens show the number of people who opened the email message. So a large difference between Opens and Unique Opens means that many people are keeping your email in their inbox and looking at it multiple times, a good sign that they're interested in its content.

Clickthroughs: Beyond open rates, clickthrough rates indicate a positive response to your email content, especially your call to action.

Unique Clickthroughs: Like Unique Opens, Unique Clickthroughs show the number of people who click links in your email. So a large difference between Clicks and Unique Clicks means that people are clicking different links in the same email message, or they might be clicking the same link more than once.

PPC Campaign Data

Clickthroughs: Understanding your clickthrough rate versus the number of times your ad was served will give you a solid idea of how engaging and relevant visitors find your pay per click campaigns.

Web Analytics Data

Average time on site: Visitors who spend a short amount of time on your site are probably much less engaged than visitors who spend longer amounts of time.

Number of page views: Interested visitors enter on one page and continue through the site. Typically, the more pages visitors see, the higher their level of engagement with your site.

Number of short visits: Short visits are essentially visitors who only look at the first page they see and then leave your site. For an email newsletter, it might be expected for visitors to do this, but if your goal is to engage them deeper into the site, short visits are a sign of landing page failure and unengaged visitors.

Number of soft goals met: Examples of what I call "soft goals" are signing up for an e-newsletter, downloading a white paper, or even just taking a closer look at an in-depth product specs page. All of these can be indicative of growing levels of visitor interest. You can establish these goals with the Lyris HQ Web analytics tool using the Funnel Report and then track them in other areas such as the Campaign Report, Search Report, or Data Dissection Report.

Number of conversion events: Certainly, going through the checkout process or filling out the lead generation form and hitting the submit button are undeniable signs of visitor engagement.

Step 2: Identify your Audiences

Not everyone in your audience has the same intent, so they need to be measured differently. You should have different expectations for an email newsletter sent to current customers than for a search engine keyword that doesn't contain your company name. Customers receiving the e-newsletter are already familiar with your organization, and your goal is probably either to cross-sell other products/services or to keep them engaged with your brand. In contrast, the visitors from search engines in this example might be researching a future buying decision.

It's important to look across all your channels of communication - email, search engines, social media, direct mail, etc. - and match them with appropriate engagement goals from step #1 based on your expectations.

For example, everyone who visits your site can be put into one large "Web site visitors" group. But they can also be segmented into smaller groups based on things they share in common. For example, Web site visitors can be segmented into "new visitors" versus "return visitors" or "visitors who arrived via a PPC campaign" versus "visitors who arrived via organic search". By taking a closer look at the audiences within your audiences, you're setting yourself up to get a more accurate picture of each audience's engagement.

Step 3: Determine What Worked and What Didn't

At this point, the marketing campaigns have been run and the data is available - it's time to take a closer look at those PPC ads, email messages and landing pages that performed well and those that were flops:

• Did one email campaign completely outperform another when it came to engagement metrics?
• Was there particular messaging that seemed to work best?
• What combination of audience segments and marketing mediums yielded the most promising results?

Compare your current results to results from past marketing campaigns to see where engagement is increasing and where you have room for improvement.

And don't worry about benchmarking your metrics against your competitors or even other businesses outside of your industry. The best benchmarks you can get are your own past performance and historic data.

Step 4: Go Beyond What Didn't Work and into Why it Didn't Work

Rather than simply creating a list of good and bad campaigns, messages and tactics, improve future visitor engagement by better understanding how and why one email campaign, landing page or PPC ad performed better than the other. Here are a couple of helpful techniques:

• Apply a Lower Standard
  Let's say you have an email marketing campaign that's intended to drive visitors to a specific goal. If too few are reaching the goal, look at average time on site or pages per visitor. If those numbers are also lower than expected, work your way back through short visit rate, clickthrough rate, etc. to find a point where the email campaign did perform well. The first data point that is underperforming can pinpoint the trouble spot.
• Segment in the Funnel Report
  The Funnel Report in Lyris HQ visually shows you how visitors are moving through your site. Create a segment to display only visitors from an underperforming campaign and apply it to the Funnel Report. Then, take a close look at the report, paying special attention to unintended areas of the site that they visit. This may reveal opportunities to cross-sell or shift your message.

Step 5: Test and Repeat

So you've launched your marketing campaign, collected the data, determined what worked and what didn't, and developed some theories around why. What's next? Test your new theories. Whether you're making a few tweaks to an email campaign or performing A/B tests on landing pages, testing should be a standard part in all of your marketing campaigns. By reviewing past performance for campaign elements that improved visitor engagement, your future campaigns will continue to meet and exceed visitors' needs and expectations.

Measuring Engagement Isn't Hard, But it is Necessary

Certainly, understanding how and why your audience is engaging with your brand is imperative to its continued success. By taking stock of your tools, identifying your target audiences, figuring out what worked and why, and collecting your insights to test in future marketing campaigns, you'll be well on your way toward achieving higher levels of audience engagement and more conversions.