68 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / August 2019THREE DIGITAL METRICS EVERY MARKETER NEEDS TO USE
TO UNDERSTAND BRAND ENGAGEMENT by LAMA ABDELBARRCove Beach in DubaiLama Abdelbarr leads on digital communications for Middle East and Africa at Talkwalker, a media monitoring and analytics company
that empowers over 2,000 brands and agencies to optimize the impact of their communication efforts. talkwalker.com‘TREPONOMICS PRO
DIGGING DEEPER
S
hould your marketing team care about engagement rates? The
short answer is no, marketers need to stop putting so much focus
on engagement rates when they measure success. The long
answer involves me talking to some industry experts to find out
what why looking at engagement rates can be misleading and how
the metric can be repurposed for deeper insights. The consensus amongst
the industry experts was that engagement rate is a vanity metric that
simply doesn’t cut it anymore. That’s why they proposed three alternative
approaches to the metric, which will allow you to dig deeper into your
audience’s actual engagement with your brand:Heba Sayed, Marketing Manager at IBM
Watson Customer Engagement, Middle
East, Africa, and TurkeyKlime Mickovski, Acting Head of
Product/Head of Data & Insights -
Digital at Sky News ArabiaJamal Al Mawed, founder and Managing
Director at Gambit Communications1. THE HEALTH OF THE
ENGAGEMENT RATE
Looking at an engagement rate
in isolation does not indicate
a whole lot. Measuring a pas-
sive act by consumers (double
tapping as they scroll down a
seemingly endless feed) does
not actually indicate anything
about the level of engage-
ment and the connection a
consumer makes with the
brand message. “In my view, a
healthy engagement rate that
is improving over time is the
key social media metric that
each brand should closelymonitor,” says Heba Sayed,
Marketing Manager at IBM
Watson Customer Engage-
ment, Middle East, Africa, and
Turkey. Marketers should shift
their focus away from how
high the engagement rate is to
focus instead on the health of
that rate. Is it improving over
time? Is that improvement
reflected in an improvement
on other metrics? Does it
amplify the brand image and
message? “This takes a lot of
work from the brand, though,
to be able to generate a con-
sistent drumbeat of messaging
and content that pleases its
audience and inspires action,”
Sayed explains. “But it's
an effort that will be highly
rewarded!”- DAILY ACTIVE USERS
Delving even deeper into
the quality of engagement,
Klime Mickovski, Acting Head
of Product/Head of Data &
Insights - Digital at Sky News
Arabia, advises marketers to
use daily active users as their
key metric. “Daily active users
are users who visit or interact
with a product or service on
a daily basis- whether that
be a company’s website,
social channels, or app,” he
explains. “This means that
your daily active users are
actually true loyal fans who
have your brand top of mind.
They are a gold mine in terms
of embodying and spreading
your message. The number of
daily active users is a far more
superior metric to the number
of followers, as it measures
the actual brand loyalists who
spread your brand awareness
and reach, and at the sametime, also directly impact the
digital revenue you gener-
ate, as they consume most of
your monetizable inventory. If
brands prioritize the number
of daily active users as their
growth metric, they will be
able to expand both their
audience and revenue.”- FLUCTUATION OVER TIME
Benchmarking results is an
important habit that can
drive marketers to achieve
more and perform better. This
is certainly an outlook that
Jamal Al Mawed, founder
and Managing Director at
Gambit Communications, also
subscribes to. “All the current
metrics such as reach, im-
pressions, hits, interactions,
engagement, etc. are just
numbers, unless we are look-
ing at the fluctuations in them
versus our competition, or our
own previous history,” Mawed
says. “That’s when we can use
them to get more insights into
what we are doing right or
wrong.” Indeed, consistently
monitoring both your brand,
as well as its competitors
can present a great array of
data to be used for actionable
insights. The best practice for
marketers would be to keep
tabs on results over time, and
deep dive into steep fluctua-
tions to understand what’s
working and what’s not.