I agree it’s best to use EF to measure any improvements you make. That’s good to know about “related posts’ plugins since I’m planning to add them in a new design that’s hopefully coming soon.

Blogs do seem to differ from the rest of the site as far as stats are concerned. Many of your loyal visitors won’t even read your blog on your site, which further increases bounce rates.

Thanks again for developing the EF metric. I really like it and think it is a good way to measure engagement. I’ll be interested to see how you or someone else possibly adds to it and it’s something I’ll be thinking about as well.

I have update my original post with a clearer definition and a brief example as per your suggestion, although as you rightly point out for the purpose of considering one set of data against another, it doesn’t really matter whether you use a percentage or a ratio, so long as it’s the same equation used to each calculation.

As will most metrics the EF is well-suited so sites that are being constantly worked on and (hopefully) improved. I use it for measuring both seasonal fluctuations (in order to gain an understanding of how seasons/times of year may skew change-related data) and also fluctuations based upon recent site changes. It is particularly good for blogs in that you can measure how well the blog itself (outside of the actual blog entry that the visitor landed on) actually captures the audience and convinces them to read further posts. Plugins such as “Related Posts” seem to have a very good effect indeed.

I capture blog stats independently of the rest of the site in Google Analytics for as you mention, they are usually very different to regular site stats and require a different approach.

I’ve noticed that too about this blog. Posts typically, though not always, have a higher bounce rate than the rest of the site. I think it’s because the posts attract a lot more long tail searches for queries that aren’t really relevant to the post.

I think EF might be a good metric to look at the health of your site or blog. It’s a ratio and really needs to be looked at in comparison. I don’t think the absolute numbers will necessarily mean anything in the same sense that 1,000 visitors means something. But I think it can be something very useful in understanding if a change you make to the site leads to more engagement with the site or to see which of your visitors interact with the site more.

What an interesting concept. I might start using it with some of our clients.

I was about to say that this metric is excellent for determining the health of a blog, not necessarily a regular site. But the more I thought about it, the less certain I am about saying so. The reason I bring this up is that I usually notice that the bounce rate for a blog is usually higher than the rest of the site.

What do you think?

That makes sense when looking at a single page. I was trying to think of other things you might use, but haven’t really come up with anything. My thoughts revolved around using page views for the page as some percentage of overall page views, but you wouldn’t really be comparing apples to apples any more. There might be something in there, though about engagement with a single page in relation to the engagement of the overall site.

Using ‘1′ probably makes the most sense.

I like how you can compare one set of traffic to another with EF. It was easy to see that my repeat visitors were more engaged with the site than first time visitors for example.

I think it would be a good idea to clarify how you’re using bounce rate in the equation. MY first instinct was to turn the rate back into a decimal so 0.50 for the 50% bounce rate. It doesn’t matter one bit in the overall equation since either way you’re just dividing by a number and using the percentage does make the result more human readable.

It might be good to explain that, though it’s not ard to figure out by seeing the results you got for your client. I was thinking one example calculation would be enough.

I really like EF and I’ll see what I can come up with in an effort to try and improve it. Something tells me it doesn’t need all that much improvement though. The more I think about it the more I think it’s pretty good as is. It’s not perfect, but in part it’s because you really can’t measure visitor engagement all that accurately. There are so many variables the stats can’t show.

In order to track the EF of a single page I have been using the value of “1″ as the pages/visit. Whilst this is almost redundant, it keeps the equation in tact and we are then still presented with easily comparable figures, which was my goal all along.

I agree that the EF is better suited to comparing a single site month-to-month than it is for comparing different sites, but the same could be said of many of the common ratios we use throughout everyday analysis.

Oh and well spotted that I’m using the Bounce Rate percentage as opposed to a ratio, do you think that is something I should clarfiy within my original post?

I have a photo on a page titled “Daddy’s Girl.” ( http://forrestcroce.com/Photos/Daddys-Little-Girl.html ) It’s a family portrait, but considering that guy on WMT who promised a link to anyone who could tell him why Google is dropping him, and turns out to have a lot of porn links … in hindsight, I can see how the title could be taken out of context. If people come in looking for fetish porn and find a G-rated, but beautifully captured photo, they’re going to bounce.

In our example, that happened, so I couldn’t just sweep it under the rug Enron style. But I’m not interested in making my site appeal to the porn crowd, so in this case, the bounces are telling me more about server load than engagement.

But that’s a convoluted example that’s on my mind because of a strange, unusual question I just answered. My design is my weakest link, and if I can improve that, I’m sure I’ll lower my bounce rate. So I’m going to track the “engagement factor” with and without bounce rates for a few months, and see if the trends make sense.

I think your example is a fair one, but keep in mind that EF can’t measure engagement for a single page so the one case may not play too much of a factor unless it was pulling in traffic not in line with the rest of your site.

I’d still like to know how well I’m engaging new visitors since all repeat visitors were new at one point.

I think the way to use EF would be to say your engagement has gone up in the last month after you made some design changes or that visitors from Ask are more engaged with your site than visitors from Yahoo!

It’s an interesting ratio and one that maybe could stand further development. I think using both time and pages/visit is a very good starting point. I do think bounce rate is a good add to the equation, but perhaps there are different ways to include it or maybe other metrics that could be added to the ratio.