Engagement is an important metric to help you understand how your audience is responding to your creatives.
It's possible to view engagement for your campaigns and individual creatives, giving you insights on how they're performing beyond simple CTR and impression counts.
What is an engagement?
The range of different interaction types mean that engagement is calculated differently for different layout types. Overall: engagement is a sum of all unique sessions where a user has:
touched the ad
tilted the phone
hovered over the ad with the mouse cursor
viewed at least 25% of the video duration in the ad, or
CTR
Let's go through the different interactions one by one.
Touch
User can touch the ad using their finger (mobile) or a mouse (desktop). This can mean the user clicked, dragged or scratched something on the ad. This includes CTR, but we also show CTR as separate event, because it is one of the most important performance metrics. Touch does not include when user touched the ad to scroll the page (eg in mobile infeed placements).
Gyroscope
When the layout (eg Panorama) has gyro-based interaction and the user has motion sensors enabled, the user can interact with the ad using gyroscope. We count an engagement when the user has viewed 70% of the image or images. Please note: in addition to gyro interaction, all gyro-based layouts also react to touch-based interactions.
Hover
Desktop advertisements also include a hover timer. If the user holds their mouse over the placement more than 1 second, we mark it as an engaged impression. This does not include scrolling.
View video
When the ad has a video, we call it an engagement once at least 25% of the video length has been viewed (also known as VTR25). The video must have been in the viewport for the same time.
CTR
This metric shows how many users clicked on the ad that directed them to your landing page. This does not include clicks that interact internally with the ad (eg pausing or unmuting a video).
User sessions
It's important to note that all engagement statistics are based on unique sessions.
If the user interacts with the creative multiple times in the same session, we only count a single engagement. When a user hovers, clicks on the ad, and views the video, this is stored as a single engagement. This is the reason why the sum of touch + gyro + hover + VTR25 does not equal engagement.
Should the user be served the same ad again later and he/she interacts with it a second time, then that will be counted as a new engagement.
Engagement example from Campaign Manager analytics
Let's take a look at an example from creative analytics page:
As you can see the sum of CTR, gyroscope, hover, touch and VTR25 (22.01%) does not equal engagement (17.02%), which is because some people:
did not watch the video, but clicked on the ad
clicked on the ad, but not on the CTR element
hovered and watched the video
etc
As some ads have a short autoplay video, the engagement numbers could be a bit misleading. For better understanding of what is the engagement is without video, you can select whether you want to include first quartile video viewing (VTR25%) in engagement calculation. By default, it is included. Note: we have collected data from 1st of July 2020, so you can choose this option only when the reporting date is after this date.
Learn more
When you are really interested in how in detail the user interacted with your ad, you can view a large range of different events and dig deeper in the analytics.