Being engaged by something, such as a piece of news media content, is clearly as you would know better than I, a very difficult thing to measure in itself without asking the people who view it about their experience afterwards or without them providing evidence that they were interested in it.

The keyword being evidence. The things you mention as evidence of “engagement”, are only in themselves indicators not proof. I agree that a comment, such as yours, is strong evidence of engagement, but this is not always the case with others.

If I tweet a link to an article does that prove I was engaged by it? It could be that I just RT someone else because the article sounds like it might be of interest to my followers but don’t actually read or engage with it myself. With so many RTs often not incorporating any edits from the party RTing how can we know that the person was engaged?

The same could equally be true of bookmarking. I might bookmark an article to come back to read later and never do so. How can one be sure?

I would humbly argue that if engagement effectively means interest (as others more qualified than I have suggested) then spending a great amount of time on a particular web page is equally evidence that an article is of interest to someone. All things being equal if you’ve stayed with me until this point in my comment it will have taken you longer and arguably you are less likely to do that if you think my comment is not of interest to you.

Soon the one hand I agree. Is time spent *the* measure of engagement – no not in the slightest and perhaps we should be making that more clear. No more than our calculation of views per url is *the* measure of readership. On the other hand are tweets, bookmarks, links etc *the* measures of engagement – no, but like time spent they provide evidence.

But only through real in depth responses can we truly assess engagement and the issue there is the time and cost involved. Hence we all seek cost effective proxy evidence instead.

It would be interesting to expand the analysis to include other metrics such as tweets, links, bookmarks etc (perhaps using another free tool like Social Mention that anyone can access?) that provide further evidence of levels of engagement. If you were up for assisting with such an exercise that would be great.

Thanks again
Adam

So ‘engagement’ in digital display means the number of people who interacted with the ad (a subset of those that consumed it, which again is a subset of those that were exposed to it).

And in social media circles ‘engagement’ tends to come from the number of people who have bookmarked, tweeted about, commented on, linked to (etc..) the content.

So perhaps you should use the word ‘consumption’ (or similar) instead of ‘engagement’ to avoid confusion (and, let’s face it, justified criticism).