Awareness, Interaction, Engagement – What are these and How to measure?

These terms are used so often in online advertising but what exactly do they mean to an advertiser and how to measure them?

Awareness as the word suggests is when the consumers get aware of the brand. This is the first touch point of the brand with the consumers. This could be done via various channels – Online, TV, out of home (billboards), Search etc. Increase in brand awareness overtime can be measured with pre-post analysis, reaching out to consumers and finding the % awareness in the marketplace and after the campaign doing a similar survey again. The Ad-recall is also a good metric to measure awareness.

Interaction is when a consumer interacts with the brand – this could be mouse-over a rich media banner or calling in for a sweep stake or even clicking on a banner. Some of the common metrics to track this is click-through rate, interaction rate, # of calls received etc.

Engagement should be when the consumer really engages with the brand and goes "Beyond" the basic steps to know more about the brand and tries to build a relationship. Some examples could be signing up for a newsletter, browsing through the site in detail, downloading a widget etc. The deeper the level of engagement the more engaged audience or consumers the brand has.