Samantha Merlivat says, “Intuitively, it makes sense that if a consumer engages with a brand’s ad or marketing message, this should count as a positive outcome. Yet, we’ve spoken to a number of marketers and measurement companies that found that optimizing for engagement ultimately did not help them drive positive business outcomes – instead leading them to waste time and media dollars on the wrong users.

The issue we keep encountering in discussions around engagement is that advertisers count interactions – clicks, shares, likes, comments, views – as proxies for engagement. There’s no clear link between these individual actions and what they are really trying to measure: are their messages moving consumers along their path to purchase, by driving either brand preference or sales?

Tina Moffett and I decided to investigate:

  1. How do we define engagement? We see a lot of confusion around various meanings of ‘engagement’. We identified two forms of engagement marketers seek to measure: 1) ‘marketing engagement’, which measures the impact of consumers’ engagement with a given campaign or channel“.

Blind Pursuit Of Engagement Is Hurting Marketers

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